


In The Daylight

by speakingwosound (sev313)



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1950s, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternative Universe - FBI, F/F, Film Noir, M/M, Warning: brief mentions of FBI-level violence, Warning: period level homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 12:31:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 49,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20064070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sev313/pseuds/speakingwosound
Summary: “Soul agencies sell possibility and connection.”“For a fee.”“Everything’s for a fee in this town.”





	1. PART I

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Dan Bang 2019 - thank you to everyone who's been involved in this challenge, it's been a joy!
> 
> Please watch the magnificent trailer Mags made: [HERE](https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/threeblondeswithanxiety/186702059868).
> 
> Content Warnings: period-level homophobia and FBI-level violence and gore.

"Who is she?" Dan asks as he holds up the police tape so he can bend under it. His back twinges and his bad knee throbs. He's getting too old for this. If he listens to his mother, who’s been counting his grey hairs for years and begging him to dye it since Christmas, he's too old for a great many things. Namely, finding a soul match, but not precluding traipsing around a crime scene before dawn.

Jon nods a thank you to the pretty young PD agent he’s been pumping for information. He taps his pencil against his notebook as he crosses to meet Dan, "Jane Doe."

Dan tilts his head towards the agent, "she give you her phone number?"

"For the fourth time this month," Jon sighs. He motions towards the river bank. "Come on, they haven't moved the body yet."

"Maybe you should call her," Dan suggests. "A couple drinks, a bit of dancing, you might even get a kiss. Seems worth it to get her off your back."

Jon shrugs, noncommittally. "The harbor master-" Jon nods at a distraught, shaking man in the distance- "Found her at 6am, but we don't know what time she was dropped. She could have spent an indeterminate amount of time in the river."

"Alyssa will know," Dan shrugs, loyally. He watches as Jon struggles to step over the second series of police tape, tripping and almost falling, face-first, into the crime scene. "Where was she dumped?"

Jon shrugs, straightening his jacket and trying to look smooth as he rights his legs under himself again. "We don't know."

"How old is she?"

"We don't know."

"Was she running with the Blacks or the Rascals or the Crips?”

"We don't know."

"And we don't know what time she was killed?"

"Nope."

"Is there anything we do know?" Dan asks, crouching down next to the tarp and lifting the edge. Dan lost count of crime scenes he’s run a decade ago, but he still almost gags, raising his wrist to cover his mouth.

Jon shrugs. "She's pretty waterlogged."

"Okay." Dan rises to his feet and slaps Jon on the shoulder. "Call me when you know literally anything."

***

"Please tell me you have something," Dan calls as he pushes through the sliding metal doors.

"That's my line," Alyssa calls. "Down here."

Dan holds up the bag of donuts he'd gone ten blocks out of his way for. "I don't know how you can eat these things in here."

Alyssa shrugs, motioning for him to drop the bag on the dissecting cart, next to her scalpels and iodine solution. "A girl's gotta eat."

Dan shivers. "Sure. Afterwards, or before. I'm not really picky on which, just, not during."

Alyssa shrugs, pulling down the sheet so he can see the body of Jane Doe, her chest expertly sewn up but still swollen with waterlog. "She was dropped sometime after midnight. Three bullet wounds here-" Alyssa points to her temple, then her chest- "here and here."

Dan pulls his suit coat past his fingers and brings his hand to his nose and mouth. "Definitely an inside job."

"Looks like it. Poor girl." Alyssa lifts the sheet over her again and motions for Dan to follow her into her office. She drops her surgical mask and opens the bag of donuts, holding them out.

"Still gross," Dan tells her, pointedly.

"Your loss."

Dan leans against her visitor's chair. "Any idea who our Jane Doe is?"

"That's your job," she rolls her eyes. "I did find this, though."

She licks her fingers clean of cinnamon dust and pulls a business card out of her pocket. It's also a little waterlogged, its edges frayed and broken. Dan can read the type though - _Jon Lovett, CEO and Founder, Swamp Souls, The Best Damn Soul Agency in the DC Area_ \- clearly enough.

"I feel like you're punishing me for standing you up last Thursday," Dan sighs, tapping the card absently against his fingers. "I already told you, I had a case."

"Some things," Alyssa tells him around a donut, "are not about your ego, such as the genre of business card a woman happens to have in her pockets when she's brutally murdered."

Dan cringes.

Alyssa shakes the bag at him. "Eat a donut, then go solve my case. And take that partner of yours, he doesn't shut up about soulmates."

Dan sighs and does what he's told.

***

Jon’s practically buzzing next to him. It’s distracting and it’s embarrassing and it’s exactly the kind of thing Director Axelrod sticks on at every one of Jon’s quarterly performance reviews. “You know what my least favorite kind of bird is?”

Jon frowns around the lip of his coffee cup. “Ahh, no. Should I? Was that in a briefing at some point?”

Dan rolls his eyes and drops his own cup - finished at least three blocks back, but kept for something to do with his hands - into the closest trash can. “The hummingbird can hover in mid-air at 80 beats per second.”

“People ask me sometimes, at the monthly field agent poker league, what it’s like working with you. You know what I say?”

“And,” Dan continues his own line of conversation. “The largest hummingbirds are only 13 cm in length. That’s one of the smallest kinds of birds there are. I can name a hundred ways to capture a 13 cm bird.”

“I tell them that there’s a lot of truth in the old FBI adage that genius comes with a touch of insanity.”

“Be happy that you’re a damn giant.”

Jon grins and drops his own cup in the next trash can. “Be happy that I enjoy a touch of insanity.”

Dan nods. “We’re in agreement then?”

Jon laughs. “Sure.”

“Good.” Dan glances down at the business card sweating in his palm, the print starting to bleed even though it’s an early mid-April morning and there’s still the smallest dusting of frost covering the tulips and the cherry blossoms struggling to bloom. “Who the fuck calls their agency Swamp Souls?”

Jon bumps his shoulder. “Someone with a sense of humor. Not that you’d understand that.”

Dan holds back every instinct in him to roll his eyes again, but he’s been trying to cut back and he’s already reached his pre-lunch quota. “A sick sense of humor for someone who sells love for a living.”

“Soul agencies don’t _sell love_,” Jon sighs. 

This isn’t the first time they’ve had this conversation and it probably won’t be their last. Jon has the misfortune to be one of the unmatched, still, at thirty-two, despite a longing to have been matched half a decade ago, with a house in the Virginia suburbs complete with a white picket fence and two kids and a horrendous commute. He does have the dog. Jon says Leo was a celebration gift to himself for graduating from the Academy with full colors. Dan would sooner believe that he’s an attempt to fill that empty space in Jon’s heart with something that isn’t blonde, vacuous, and ultimately more interested in his title than in the open way he smiles or the unerringly honest way he trusts.

Dan needs both his hands and both his feet to count the number of times he’s found himself in one of DC’s most reputable speakeasies, downing whiskeys as fast as the bartender could bring them as Jon bemoans the state of love, DC, and his palms. Those nights are a staple of both their professional and working relationships.

Jon, though, always picks himself up the next day, brushes off his knees, and holds his hand out to the next pretty girl to walk across his path. That resilience, too, is foundational.

Jon’s smiling at Dan, now, with the same look he always has on those mornings, like he pities Dan for not trying much more than he pities himself for trying and failing. “Soul agencies sell possibility and provide spaces for connection.”

“Right.” Dan mentally puts a penny in the jar at the office and does roll his eyes. “For a fee.”

Jon shrugs. “Everything’s for a fee in this town.”

“Exactly.” Dan stops in front of a large wooden door with ’Swamp Souls’ painted in perfect, swooping lettering across the top. “If you’re not careful, DC will eat you alive and spit you out again, and soulmate agencies are the worst offenders.”

Jon opens his mouth to argue, but Dan raises his first to knock before Jon can get the words out.

***

“We should take a poll on lunch. Scratch that, I’ve been craving a reuben ever since Steph rubbed hers in my face in that last letter. DC’s a fucking wasteland- What, are there no other single, Long Island Jews stuck in this place? Preferably one whose mother taught them how to make a decent thousand island. I heard there’s a new place on 15th and G. Lowe’s? Lewis’? Luigi’s?”

“Loeb’s?” Dan offers, shoving his hands into his pockets and curving his shoulders inwards so he doesn’t have to touch anything. Swamp Souls is exactly what he expected it to be, old and seedy and just screaming for a con artist.

“Yes, yes.” Lovett - or, at least, who Dan assumes must be Lovett - snaps his fingers as he pokes his head out of his office door. He grins at Dan, but the grin slowly slides into confusion. “Who are you? Tanya, who is he?”

“He-” Tanya slides up from her desk so she can hand Lovett a stack of file folders- “is from the FBI, so play nice.”

Lovett takes the folders automatically, not commenting on her stockinged feet or the heels thrown haphazardly under her desk. “The FBI?”

Jon grins from where he’s sitting on the edge of Tanya’s desk, her purple stone paperweight in his hands. “Yep.”

“Well, I guess you better come in then.” Lovett stands aside, sucking in his stomach as if Dan and Jon both need the extra space. Dan’s almost certain that Lovett’s holding back a comment about their egos. Once they’re in his office, Lovett hisses at Tanya, “your job is to tell me when the fucking Feds show up.”

“My job,” Tanya says, brushing her long braid across her shoulder, “is to run this place, not take your calls. And I can’t do lunch, I have plans.”

Lovett’s face changes instantly, his cheeks widening and deepening as his pale skin flushes an interesting array of pinks. “With-?” Then he stops himself, glancing accusingly at Dan and Jon. “Never mind. We’ll talk after.”

“No we won’t,” she calls, good-naturedly.

Lovett sighs and lets his office door slide closed. It’s old and creaky and flecks of paint fall to the floor as it closes. “How can I help you gentleman? I assure you, all my papers are in order.”

“We’re not here about your papers,” Dan tells him. “Although, pro tip, telling an agent that, unbidden, is awfully suspicious.”

Lovett winces as he crosses the room and leans against his desk chair, dropping his hand to pet a blonde, curly head. “Noted.”

“Hi.” Jon steps forward, dropping his head and his voice to look at the dog. “Who’s this?”

“This is Pundit.” Lovett ruffles a sleepy ear. “She’s ferocious.”

“Very,” Jon agrees.

Dan pinches his wrist and resists kicking Jon’s insole. “We’re here because this-” He puts the business card on the top of a rickety looking stack of papers, pulling them back on track. “Was found at a crime scene yesterday.”

“Really?” Lovett lights up, his shoulders softening and his voice heightening as he picks up the business card.

“Really,” Dan deadpans.

Lovett takes the recrimination in Dan’s voice and tries to straighten his features. “I mean, that’s really awful. It’s just, this is how all the best dime novels start. I’ve been thinking of writing my own. Dime novel, I mean, or maybe a script? All the money’s moving to Hollywood these days.”

Jon laughs. “I’d watch that film.”

Dan clears his throat. “The business card.”

“Right.” Lovett looks down at it. “I hand these out to all of my clients, I can’t really tell you much just from this.”

Jon finally straightens from petting the dog and reaches into his briefcase. He pulls out a series of photos from the crime scene and lays them out in front of Lovett.

Lovett takes one look at them and covers Pundit’s eyes. He swallows. “My business card was found on that? Her?”

Jon nods. “We found her at the river.” He can feel Dan’s glare - Dan knows he can, by the way he keeps rubbing the back of his neck, right where’s Dan’s trying to drill two holes with his eyes - but he plows on. “That’s why she looks so rough. Do you recognize her?”

Lovett nods. Dan regrets, just a little, the light that bleeds out of him and seeps into the old, stained rug under their feet.

“Her name’s Katie Resnik. She came to me a few months ago-” Lovett starts digging through the piles on his desk. “I have her address, if that would be helpful?”

“Immensely,” Jon effuses, as Dan shrugs, “sure.”

Lovett unearths a folder and grabs a pad, writing out the address in scratchy, barely legible print. He hands it and the photos to Jon. “I am sorry she’s dead.”

Dan nods. “Me too.”

***

“I don’t know,” Jon says as he steps out of the car and stretches, his long back bowing in the late afternoon light. It hadn’t been a long drive, but the FBI-provided cars are made for much smaller men and Dan feels it, too, in the crooks of his knees and the tight muscles of his lower back. “I kind of liked him. He made me laugh.”

“He’s a con artist,” Dan repeats, for what must be the fifth time. “Didn’t Quantico teach you anything about the pitfalls of charisma?”

Jon shrugs. “He seemed real enough to me.”

“He seemed like he was hiding something to me.” Dan looks down at the scrawled address and up at the apartment building in front of them. It was built in the ‘20s, with Art Deco filigree and peeling gold-tinted murals out front. “This is the right place, come on.”

Jon follows behind him, up the ostentatious staircase with its crumbling steps and through the hallway with its flickering lights. Thirty years ago, Dan can imagine this place was the height of fashion. Thirty years can really do a number, though. Dan should know.

“3A?” Jon asks, reaching up to knock on the door.

Dan slaps his hand away, nodding at the door knob. It’s already slightly ajar, and Dan hears the click-slick of Jon cocking his gun. Dan nods at him to lead, taking in everything as he follows slowly: the baseboard peeling away from the wall, three-day old dishes piled in the sink, the coffee maker still gurgling around a layer of burnt sludge.

Jon crouches down, picking up a cashmere scarf. “I saw this pattern at the Quonset Club last month-”

“Why were you-?” Dan starts to ask, his gun still cocked and directed towards the inner rooms. “Right, the endless parade of blondes. Never mind.”

Jon glares at him. “What it means, is that she may have lived in a dump, but she had a moneyed benefactor.”

Dan nods towards the bedroom. “Still adding up to gang activity to me.”

Jon nudges the bedroom door open, entering gun first. “What happened to keeping all options open before-”

Jon trails off and Dan frowns. “Jon?” He calls, as he picks up a chipped china plate. “Do you know as much about china patterns as you do Hermes scarves?”

“Fuck, fuck, hands up, I’m a member of the FBI, sir, you have until the count of three until-”

Fuck. Dan drops the plate and it shatters against the floor as Dan races into the bedroom. Jon’s gun is raised, his finger on the trigger. 

He has it half-pressed, but as Dan pushes into the room, he sees Jon hover, hesitating for a deadly instant as he asks, “-_Tommy_?”

The name doesn’t mean anything to Dan, but it means something to the room’s other occupant. Not enough to make him hesitate, too, but just enough to change his angle as he shoots.

Dan rushes forward, catching Jon’s good arm as he falls into a crouch.

“I’m _fine_,” Jon clenches his teeth. “Get Tommy.”

Dan looks up, just in time to see a flash of blond hair and well-pressed dress pants, before he’s gone.

***

“It’s just a flesh wound.” Michael shrugs as he finishes sticking a bandage to Jon’s shoulder and starts wrapping a bandage to hold it steady. “Not more than a scratch, really.”

Jon glares at him, his cheekbones and his eyes narrowing. “I’ll give you a scratch when I can raise my fucking arm again.”

“In 5-10 days I’ll await your call to the battlefield.”

“Better buy a white flag of surrender, just in case.”

“A handkerchief will do in a pinch.”

“If you wanna half-ass it, sure.” Jon hisses as Michael hits a sore spot. “Seems fitting, really, with the way you half-ass everything else, like your _medical license_.”

“I assure you, the FBI wouldn’t keep me on retainer if my paperwork wasn’t all in order.” Michael ties off the bandage and pats Jon’s arm. “There, good as new.”

“Good as the old Jon, anyway,” Dan interjects. 

He’s been sitting at Michael’s desk, his feet up on the blotter, with Katie Resnik’s file open in his lap. It doesn’t say anything new, or interesting. A few extra notes from Alyssa: Resnik was, gratefully and surprisingly, untouched except for the gunshot wounds. A few extra notes from Agent Cone: the apartment building is owned by an old couple who bought the building on war bonds after the first world war, but is managed by a shady fellow the Bureau’s had their eyes on for awhile.

Dan commits the manager’s name to memory, then closes the file. “So he’s chained to his desk for 5-10 days?”

“Fuck no,” Jon says, quickly.

“If he feels comfortable, he can do whatever the hell he wants,” Michael sighs. “But the arm’s gonna be weak and he’s probably not going to be great with a gun.”

“I’m left handed.”

“Right.” Michael shrugs. “Then he’s fine.”

“What kind of damage will a whiskey do to his painkillers?” Dan asks, pulling his feet off Michael’s desk and standing.

“The interesting kind.”

“Perfect.” Dan nods for Jon to follow him. “Come on, Agent Favreau, we have a few things to talk about.”

***

Alyssa meets them at the The Tabard with a folder and a sympathetic look that does nothing to quell the bitching Jon’s been doing ever since they left Michael’s care.

“It’s just a scratch,” Dan sighs, undoing the top button on his jacket as they settle into their usual back corner table.

Alyssa laughs, “even a scratch deserves a whiskey,” and waves the bartender over to them. She leans across the table, her chin on her hands and a rosy flush on her cheeks. “Mary, dear, my good friend Jon has been gravely wounded in battle. See if you can’t find something to perk him up?”

Mary laughs, throwing her towel over her shoulder and batting her eyelashes at Alyssa. They’re long and dark, at odds with the overalls and working man’s linen shirt she wears under them. Mary’s famous in DC circles for her no-nonsense, women’s-focused bar-turned-institution and, for some reason Dan can never fathom, she’s taken a shining to Alyssa. “And for you?”

“The usual.” Alyssa crosses her legs, quite obviously checking Mary’s ass out, before turning her considerable attention on Jon. “So, Pfeiffer tells me that you only have yourself to blame for this scratch.”

“Stop calling it a scratch,” Jon grumbles, remembering to hold his elbow gingerly. Alyssa raises an eyebrow and he sighs. “I know-” He swallows, his eyes darkening and his face twisting with a long-forgotten pain Dan’s never seen before. “I knew him, the guy in Ms. Resnik’s bedroom.”

Alyssa flicks her eyes at Dan, then back at Jon. “You _know_ the hardened criminal who shot our Jane Doe in cold blood?”

“_Knew_,” Jon corrects. “And we don’t know if he’s the one who shot her.”

“Pardon me,” Mary interrupts, brandishing a tray one-handed. She bows as she hands Jon something that looks like rubbing alcohol, “for your service,” before handing Dan and Alyssa much more reasonable looking glasses, garnished with sprigs of thyme and dried juniper berries. 

Jon looks at them, longingly, and Dan laughs, tightening his hand around his sweating glass. “This man - Tommy? - is our prime suspect.”

“Tommy Vietor,” Jon sighs. He takes a sip of his drink and coughs into the back of his hand. “Fuck, Alyssa.”

“I didn’t make it,” she says, archly.

Jon sighs and takes another fortifying sip, his nose scrunching. “Tommy and I were at Quantico together. He was- He had the same way with people that I had with words. We had all our classes together, bunked together, played football - well, he played tailback, while I mostly watched from the sidelines.”

“All American boy,” Alyssa snorts.

Jon looks into his glass, as if that can hide the flush spreading across his cheeks. “Yeah, he was. Top of our class, voted most-likely to make director before forty. He was-” Jon sighs. “I was alone and homesick and he reminded me of home.”

Dan hears the twist in Jon’s words and instinctively wants to lean over and squeeze Jon’s good shoulder. He spreads his hand across his own knee to curtail the gesture. “What happened?”

“I honestly don’t know.” Jon shrugs. “He disappeared a few weeks before graduation. We assumed he was plucked by the CIA, covert ops or something, but, I don’t know, I always kinda figured something had happened with his mother. He left behind half of his belongings and no messages.”

“Huh.” Alyssa hits Dan’s shoulder. “You didn’t tell me we were gonna get a melodrama with our gin.”

Dan holds up his hands, “I didn’t know,” but he can’t tear his eyes away from Jon’s hollowed cheeks and dark eyes. Jon’s always been unerringly and infuriatingly positive, and to see him look so young and hurt- Dan does reach over to tap his shoulder. “We’ll find him.”

Jon nods and downs the rest of his rubbing alcohol in one gulp. “Can I get a gin and tonic this time?”

Alyssa laughs and waves for Mary.

***

“The FBI agents are here again,” Tanya calls. She’s still wearing stockinged feet, and a pencil skirt that swishes as she walks. Her tight leather jacket wouldn’t be allowed in any other business in the District.

Jon laughs as they hear crashing from within the office, followed by a steady stream of expletives. He sticks his head around the open doorway and waves. “Hi, Lovett. Do you need a hand?”

Dan peers over Jon’s shoulder. “Why are you on the floor?”

Lovett glares at both of them and rises, his thighs bunching under his pants and his calves covered in dirt and dust from the carpet. Pundit woofs as he dislodges her from his lap and Tanya shakes her head. “I’ll find a vacuum somewhere. You should really clean this place more often.”

“What do I pay you for again?”

“To look pretty and balance out this whole-” She waves her hands in a circle around Lovett’s chest- “crazy thing you’ve got going on.”

“Oh, is that it?”

She nods. “Yep.”

He sighs, resting a hand on the swell of his hip and turning to Dan and Jon. “Two visits in one week. Careful, or I’ll start to feel special.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” Dan agrees.

Lovett nods. “The horror.” His face twists. “Honestly, though, what are you doing here? I’m not due for a raid for another few months.”

Jon raises an eyebrow, the effect ruined as he leans down to pet Pundit’s ears. “You have a schedule? How often do you get raided?”

“Never.” Lovett scowls. “So far, but with you two clowns poking around every other day-”

“We’re not clowns,” Jon exclaims.

“What are you hiding?” Dan raises an eyebrow, running his hands idolly along the edge of Lovett’s desk. The piles, as far as Dan can see, are all color coded and labeled with names, similar to the one for Katie Resnik. Dan wonders, though, what he’d find, deeper down, or among whatever Lovett was working on on the floor. 

“Nothing,” Lovett says, much too quickly.

“I believe you,” Dan says, slowly, picking up the top folder on a stack. “It’s just, most companies aren’t worried about an FBI raid and they're definitely not counting down to them.”

Lovett snatches it out of his hands. “I run a soulmate agency. I am perfectly aware of what the Bureau-” Lovett’s tongue twists around the word- “thinks of legitimate businesses like mine.”

Jon shrugs. “I like soulmate agencies. You add love into the world, what more important calling can there be than that?”

Lovett opens his mouth, then closes it. He looks an awful lot like a blowfish, with the round cheeks and the verbal spokes, and Dan can’t hold back a chuckle as Lovett splutters, “where’d they _find you_?”

Jon shrugs. “Boston.”

“Not what I meant.”

“I know, but,” Jon shrugs, “that’s a story I don’t normally tell without a drink in my hand.”

“Is that an offer?”

“No,” Jon says quickly, then tips forward on the balls of his feet. “It could be?”

Dan groans, hoping it’ll cover the frantic beating of his heart. He clasps his hands behind his back, willing them to stop fucking shaking. Jon doesn’t know. Jon didn’t mean anything by it. It was only an implication- Less than an implication, really. A bit, a joke, just another example of Jon not knowing when to quit.

Lovett shakes his head, “you’re fucking mad,” and seems to be as done with this line of questioning as Dan is. “I assume you’re here for something?”

Jon flushes an interesting shade of cranberry and Dan picks up for him. “Tommy Vietor, does that name ring any bells?”

Lovett hums, “sounds vaguely familiar, why?” He looks up, and it’s almost normal, it could be normal, to most people it would be, but Dan notes the extra cock to his hip and the way his fingers clutch the folder between them.

Jon recovers enough to explain, “we think he has something to do with the dead woman we brought you last time, Katie Resnick?”

Lovett snaps his fingers and starts digging. “Right, right, that’s why it sounds familiar, yes, it’s right here, let me see-” He grabs a folder and flips it open with a flourish. “Yeah, I thought so. Katie came in to look for her soulmate about six months ago. My partner dealt with all the paperwork, but I interviewed her when she came in.”

“You have a business partner?” Dan interrupts.

Lovett blinks. “Did. He left for a, ahh, more reputable line of work. Or, I always assumed I did. Always did love Journalism, was obsessed with those fluff pieces, you know? I came in one day and he’d, just, cleared all his stuff out. Anyway, this was the last case he worked on before he skipped town. That’s why I didn’t recognize it immediately.”

Jon reaches out for the folder, his face already lighting up with the potential of a love story. “What does this have to do with Tommy?”

Lovett raises an eyebrow at the use of the familiar, but he doesn’t comment on it. “He is - was? I never know how to refer to soulmates of the deceased - Resnik’s soulmate. One of the fastest matches I’ve ever made, actually. I connected them right away and they lived, ahh, not so happily ever after.”

Jon nods and Dan can read sympathy in the softness of his shoulders and the tightening of his brow. Dan’s going to have to remind him that his Academy crush-turned Houdini is now the prime suspect in a gang-related murder case. Fuck. Sometimes, Dan would prefer working alone.

Dan pinches the bridge of his nose. “Do you have his address?”

Lovett nods, reaching for a pen. “I have _an_ address. It’s way out in Virginia, though, so I don’t know if it’s actually his or-” He shrugs as he holds it out. “Godspeed.”

Their fingers brush as Dan reaches for the scrap of paper. “Thank you. Hopefully we won’t be seeing you again.”

“That is the reaction I tend to bring out in people,” Lovett sighs.

Dan snorts. “Hard to see why.”

But, as Lovett walks them out, his feet bare on the creaky wood floor and Pundit trotting along at his heels, Dan has the ridiculous feeling that, despite everything, he wouldn’t mind coming around here again.

***

“Wow.” Jon bends, craning his neck so he can look up at the imposing house through the front windshield. He whistles. “This is _a house_.”

Dan laughs uncomfortably. When his family came back from years in Brazil and then Japan, they’d moved into an embarrassing monstrosity in Delaware, with a mile-long driveway and a white fence that doesn’t count as picket. Every morning and every afternoon, Dan had walked that mile from the bus stop, rather than letting his dad drive him to school. Every evening, he’d asked if they could move back to their three-bedroom high-rise in Tokyo or their villa on the hill just outside of São Paulo.

Now, Dan lives in a respectable two bedroom apartment in a good part of town that he has no trouble paying for. He hides from most money-related conversations and purposefully does not ask Jon how he is getting by on his Junior Agent salary.

But even to Dan, the Vietor compound is incredible. It has ten bedrooms if it has one and is newly painted in the powder blue that’s been in style for only a few months now. The house’s privacy is maintained via a wall of flora and fauna imported from, if Dan has to guess, the Italian mountains. Dan remembers the creeping vines and small, purple flowers, at least, from a family trip to Turin, back when he and Bob were both young enough to notice.

“We always split the pizza bill, at the Academy,” Jon frowns, as he gets out of the car, holding his injured arm gingerly so he doesn’t bump it. He cranes his neck to gaze up all three stories and Dan can see the angry twist of Jon’s throat as he swallows unhappily. “What else was he hiding from me?”

Dan squeezes his good shoulder and steps around him. “Let’s find out.”

They’re met by a butler in a full three-piece suit, who gives them - or, well, gives the FBI badge Dan holds up - a little bow. “I will call the mistress of the house.”

Taylor is as tall and blonde as her brother, dressed not in the sunflower tea dress Dan had expected, but a pair of pin-striped trousers and a sailor’s blouse. Her hair is pushed absently behind her ear, and her temples are dotted with the same watercolor paint that covers her fingertips. “The FBI? What do I owe this pleasure?”

Dan pockets his badge. “We’re looking for your brother. Tommy Vietor.”

Her gaze is steady. “He doesn’t live here anymore.”

“He used this address on a soulmate application.” Dan nods for Jon to hand over the folder. “Just a few months ago.”

Taylor takes it, her hands shaking a little as she looks at the headshot Katie Resnik had submitted to the agency. “She’s so pretty.”

“She was,” Dan agrees.

"Was?" Taylor closes her eyes and the folder. “She’s dead?”

Dan nods, finding that he doesn’t have to fake sympathy in the face of her red-rimmed eyes and broken voice. “A few days ago. We’re sorry for your loss.”

“Not my loss, I never met her. I just feel bad for Tommy. He always wanted a soulmate, used to talk the possibilities 'til death, or at least until I shoved him out of the sailboat.” She shakes her head, her posture tightening and the lines around her mouth narrowing. “This is so like Tommy- Fuck.” She closes the folder and hands it back to Dan, holding his gaze. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I haven’t seen my brother in five years. I didn’t even know he’d found his soulmate, fucking bastard.”

Dan flinches, but Jon steps forward. “Five years ago, was that the night he disappeared from the Academy?”

Taylor swivels her gaze to Jon. “What do you know about that? Does Tommy have an FBI file?”

“No, no, nothing like that- Well,” Jon pauses, “I don’t know, actually. He might. But-” He steps forward and holds out his hand. “I’m Jon Favreau, I was in Tommy’s class at Quantico.”

“Favs?” Taylor’s entire demeanor changes, and she grasps Jon’s hand in both of hers. “_The_ Favs? The Favs who convinced Tommy to break into the boathouse and let all the kayaks free before dawn?”

Jon chuckles. “Tommy convinced _me_, but, guilty as charged.”

“Wow, you’ve filled out nicely.” Taylor flushes. “I mean, in pictures, you were always so tall and kinda scrawny and- I’m not helping my case here.”

Jon laughs. “No, but, it’s okay. We met, once, first year. Your parents were in town for a gala and we all went out to dinner at that seafood place-”

“Shoreline,” Taylor supplies, “yeah, I remember. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, but, looking like that, I’m not sure I was supposed to.”

Jon ducks his head. “It’s really not that big of a difference.”

“Baby-faced Jonathan Favreau, all grown up now, with a badge and a suit and-” Her eyes flick down to his ring finger.

Jon holds up his hand, sheepishly. “Not yet. You?”

“Nah.” Taylor shrugs and picks at a piece of drying paint on her temple. “No need. A soulmate would just get in the way of my painting.”

“Tommy was always so proud of you.” Jon’s smile spreads and thins. “Kept trying to get me to go to New York and Boston and Providence for your shows.”

“I have one starting at the Dupont Theater Gallery next month, if you’d like to make it up to me.” She winks.

“I just might do that.”

“I’ll have you added to the guest list.”

“Thanks.” Jon shoves his hands back into his pockets. “You really haven’t heard from him since Quantico?”

She shakes her head, blond tendrils escaping from behind her ear and sticking in the swaths of paint. “I wait for him to call, every day. I’m going to kick his ass so damn hard next time I see him."

“Save a little of him for me.”

“Will do.” She shuffles her feet. “You don’t- You think he might have had something to do with this girl’s death, don’t you?”

Jon opens his mouth, then closes it helplessly.

Dan steps forward. “We don’t know anything yet, we’re just chasing down leads.”

“Yeah.” She bites her lip. “The Tommy I know wouldn’t have ever done something like that.”

“Not the Tommy I know either,” Jon nods. “But-”

“But,” she repeats sadly.

***

The executive director is waiting in Dan’s office when he gets back from Virginia, windswept and sweating from the long, humid, silent drive. Dan’s even more grateful that he’d sent Jon home - or, more likely, directly to the pub - as he drops his briefcase onto his desk. “What do I owe the pleasure, Director?”

Director Axelrod glances at the folder sticking out of Dan’s briefcase. “You were working on the Resnick case?”

Dan nods. “I was going to grab a sandwich, then come brief you. We have a suspect, just got back from his sister’s house. You’ll have a hard time believing the story once I tell you-”

“Oh, I’d believe you.” A second man materializes out of the shadows.

It takes every bit of training in Dan not to jump a foot off the ground. He glances from the man to Axe, with the sinking feeling that he’s wandered into an unsuspecting ping-pong match.

“This is Special Agent Rhodes.” Axe nods at him. “Of the CIA.”

“It’s nice to meet you.” Special Agent Rhodes holds out his hand.

Dan takes it. “Field Agent Dan Pfeiffer. What brings you to the FBI, Agent Rhodes?”

“Ben, please.” He smiles and it spreads across his face without any of the good humor Dan’s used to provoking on first meetings.

“Ben, then.” Dan tries to smile, anyway, the best, winning smile he learned on his second day of school in Brazil. “What can I do for you?”

“You can step off the Resnick case.”

Dan’s eyes flick to Axe, but the Director holds up his wrists in a _my hands are tied_ gesture. “We’ve made great progress on the Resnick case.”

“I know.” Ben’s tone is light, but Dan gets the feeling that, under it, lies more knowledge of Dan’s own dealings than his own memory can hold. “That’s why we need you to back off.”

Dan’s eyes narrow. “A woman is dead.”

“And the Agency deeply regrets that.” The sides of Ben’s eyes pinch. “But there are larger strings at play, here, and sacrifices must be made.”

“Sacrifices?” Dan flashes back to the picture of Katie Resnik, her body still and bloated, before flipping to Taylor, standing strong and hopeful, illuminated by the morning light off the ocean. “For what? You need to give my something here, if you want me to just forget a dead woman.”

“No I don’t.” Ben shrugs on his jacket in one move, and Dan’s absolutely certain that the flash of the badge at his waist is not an accident. “These orders come directly from the Director.”

The hairs on the back of Dan’s neck rise and he feels a cool hand shiver down his spine. He’s never quite learned the rules of self-preservation, though, and he opens his mouth-

Axe steps forward, nodding at Ben. “You can tell the Director that his message has been received.”

“Like hell it has,” Dan blurts, before he can think better of it.

Axe’s expression darkens and Dan swallows.

“Right, well,” Dan’s words twist and burn, tasting like ash on his tongue, “whatever the Director orders.”

Ben nods and opens the door - “Good day, gentleman. Pleasure doing business with you” - before letting it slam closed behind him.


	2. PART II

Jon drops a greasy bag in Dan’s lap, hard enough that it splatters across the folders he has stacked there. Dan suppresses a sigh as he lifts the bag. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me too much,” Jon shrugs, folding himself into the passenger seat, his long knees pressed to his chest. “It’s from that place on 8th.”

“The one with the donut lady who doesn’t wear a hairnet?”

Jon nods, half a smirk playing at the side of his mouth. “She tries.”

“She does not.”

“No, she really doesn’t.”

Dan sighs again and drops the bag into the backseat.

Jon raises an eyebrow. “I went five blocks out of my way to buy you breakfast, don’t waste it.”

“You went five blocks out of your way to buy me a guilt trip,” Dan corrects. “Which is misplaced, because _I_ didn’t kill the Resnik case. You should buy Director Axelrod a bag of hairy donuts.”

Jon snorts. “And lose my balls? No thank you, I think I’ll keep redirecting my frustration at the bearer of the bad news.”

Dan sighs deeply and dumps the stack of folders into Jon’s lap. “The Director has decided to keep our balls too busy to step out of line, apparently. Read the top one, that’s our first new case.”

Jon rolls his eyes, but he opens the folder as Dan carefully pulls the car out of its spot in front of Jon’s apartment. It’s a warm DC morning, the days racing into summer humidity now that they’ve turned the corner into May. Dan can already feel the sweat stains pooling under his armpits and he rolls down the window to release the musk rolling off of Jon in frustrated waves.

“Andrew Sheffield,” Jon reads. “36. Took over Sheffield’s-”

Dan raises an eyebrow. “That place has been a front for decades.”

“-from his father just six months ago.” Jon turns the page. “Sad, really. He only got to rape and pillage for six months before he was cut down in his prime.”

“A shame.”

“The shame-iest.” Jon closes the folder. “This case is open and shut. They don’t need us.”

“The Metro PD asked for our help.” Dan sighs, turning right and parking just outside the police barricade. “We go where we’re needed.”

Jon opens the door, the new folder clasped in his hands. He stops halfway out of the car, one leg on the burning pavement and one still folded into his chest. He doesn’t quite look at Dan. “You know what I thought when I found out I’d be working with the most promising new agent in the force?”

Dan swallows. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel as he struggles against the pull of memory.

Jon continues, his voice quiet - “You had such a reputation for knowing right from wrong, and pursuing right at all costs. I thought, how fucking lucky am I, to get to learn from that man?” - and then slides out of the car and lets the door slam closed behind him.

***

Dan has fucked up - royally, irreversibly, inescapably fucked up - exactly three times in his life.

The first time, he was eleven years old, with knobby knees and a Portuguese lilt to his accent. His entire young consciousness had been framed by the white sand beaches and bright, permissive attitudes of São Paulo. All he knew were lean, tan bodies wrapped in all colors of the rainbow and exuberant smiles, dancing long into the night under half-broken street lamps.

At first glance, Tokyo was the opposite of Brazil. Tall, austere buildings arranged in neat grids that quite literally scraped the sky where São Paulo was low, wooden rooms build up and up and up, haphazardly. Underneath all that, though, Dan found that Tokyo beat with the same warm, communal, embracing heart that São Paulo had. He quickly felt at home among the loud voices he learned to understand, shouting across busy market squares where personal space was unheard of and the air smelled of salt and oil and vinegar. 

It was this kindred spirituality - and Dan’s parents’ failure to explain the conservative vein underlying the sons of Tokyo’s uber-elite who Dan was at school with - that lulled Dan into a false sense of security. These were the thoughts running through his head when, one day after school, Dan had skipped basketball practice to sneak behind the bleachers with his first real, true Japanese friend. 

Iko was shorter and more compact than the boys Dan knew in Brazil, but he was whip-smart and had a long strand of hair that he used to push behind his ear when he was nervous. Iko was the one who took Dan beyond the US compounds, who showed Dan the devastating after-effects of a World War Dan had only ever thought of as morally good and true. It was Iko who first talked about mushroom clouds and poisoned air, about screams and sirens that still haunted his nightmares.

Iko opened Dan’s mind and, while the other boys were giggling about girls with hair as straight as straw and skin as pale as porcelain, it was Iko Dan opened his palms to. Behind those bleachers, with the sun settling low and hazy over the horizon, Dan laid his hands bare, traced his own soul line, asked if Iko’s matched his. Dan had shivered when Iko touched him, felt Iko tremble when he’d traced Iko’s own, straighter and shorter than his.

The next day, though, Iko refused to share the perfect sashimi his mother packed him for lunch. He sat three desks behind Dan in literature and two desks away in maths. He was quiet, uncharacteristically and worryingly silent, until Dan fell into step next to him after school, and then he said “my mom says I can’t see you anymore, I’m not a fucking poof” in clipped English. Dan clenched his fist, felt his soul line burn through his arm, his chest, his heart.

Dan never opened his palm to anyone again.

***

“Pfeiffer here.”

The phone crackles and pops and Dan pulls it away from his ear to frown at it. Generally, the FBI switchboard is very good at rerouting prank calls.

“You’ve reached Agent Pfeiffer,” he tries, one more time.

The line splutters, then bursts to life with a deep, modulated voice. “I have a tip.”

Dan sighs, sliding the phone into the crook of his shoulder so he can reach for the Sheffield case file. He makes sure that he sounds as distracted as he wants to. “The FBI doesn’t take lightly to jokes and tricks.”

The phone crackles and the voice coughs, before modulating again. “It’s about the Resnick case.”

Dan sits up, loud enough that his chair squeaks.

The voice chuckles. “I thought that might get you interested.”

Dan glances up to make sure that his door is closed tightly, then drops the Sheffield file in favor of a blank notepad. “You’ve got my attention.”

“Good.” The phone crackles. “Your men - as brilliant and competent as they purport to be - missed something.”

“How do you know that?”

The voice ignores him. “Something big.”

Dan sighs. “Are you going to tell me what it is? Or are you just going to continue to taunt a federal agent?”

“I can multitask.” The voice chuckles, a familiar sound that niggles at the back of Dan’s mind. “Anyway, you should take a second sweep of the docks. Northeast side.”

Dan pushes the creep of recognition aside and jots _NE_ on his pad. “And what will I find?”

“You’re the federal agent. I’m not going to do all the work here.”

Dan sighs. “If you make me look a fool-”

There’s a loud click and then the other line goes dead. Dan sighs, deeper this time, and dials the switchboard.

“Hi, Nancy, the number that just called? Did he leave a name?”

“Let me check.” There’s the rustle of papers, then she comes back online. “Sorry, sir, he doesn’t seem to have.”

Dan groans. “Maybe let a few less of the crackpots through, Nancy.”

“Yes, sir. Apologies, sir. Won’t happen again.”

“It’s alright,” Dan shakes his head. “No harm done. Thank you.”

He hangs up, staring at the phone for a long time, before he gets up and reaches for his suit coat. He slides his arm inside, pulling it over his shoulders as he stops behind Jon’s chair.

Jon glances up, his expression tightening as he sees Dan. He holds up his notepad, defensively. “I’ve been making calls, chasing down the baker from the Sheffield case, but-”

“Leave it.” Dan tilts his head. “Grab your coat.”

***

The second time Dan fucked up, he was seventeen and just months away from the Academy.

His family had moved back from Japan a couple years earlier, ostensibly to give him and Bob a better chance at a successful future. Or to give them time to acclimate, in which case, Dan guesses suburban Delaware was as good a choice as any.

But, Delaware was Delaware. Smaller than Tokyo, quieter than São Paulo, more lonely than both. Dan managed to fit himself in between the cracks, doing just fine enough in his classes to build himself a lifeline out of the state and not nearly as fine in basketball as he dreamed. He had friends, guys who spent their Friday nights drinking beers on the hoods of their cars with Dan and their Saturdays at the drive-in with their girls. Dan was consecutively the third wheel, then the fifth, then the ninth, and then he started making his Saturday night excuses.

Sam moved to Wilmington six months before the end of their senior year. The move was brutal on Sam and his little sister, a godsend to Dan's lonely Saturday nights. What started with late night video games and babysitting became late night video games and babysitting and handjobs. By mid-summer, they'd graduated to blowjobs and kisses, whispered promises in the dark of Sam's parents' basement. Dan made plans and Sam never argued and never asked to see his palm.

In August, Sam was leaving for Harvard. Dan spent one last night on the black leather sofa, cracked and broken from two months of teenage hips and knees and elbows. And then, as dawn was rising on Sam's last night in Delaware, he slid out from under Dan, wouldn't look at him as he ended things. An easy, simple break, he’d said. No chance of a future, he’d said. The chance, he’d said, to find their soulmates.

Dan pressed his palm to his chest, watched the sun glint of Sam's full head of blond hair, and promised himself to never give his heart away again.

***

“While I appreciate your sudden interest in defying the Director’s orders,” Jon sighs, turning to take in the dock in its entirety, “we’ve already been through the crime scene. Twice.”

Dan covers his eyes against the bright afternoon sun. He’s always liked the ocean. He grew up with his feet in the sand and his eyes gazing east, trying to decipher what exists beyond the horizon - Delaware, it turns out, which is neither magical nor mystical - and dreaming about a life bigger and grander than his future held. He does not, however, like the docks, with their splotches of oil and their sharp corners and their dark shadows.

Nothing good has ever happened down at the docks.

Dan marks the sun’s spot and turns northeast, walking in a straight line from where the harbor master had pulled Resnik’s body out of the river. “Are you willing to stake a woman’s life on the effectiveness of our officers?”

“I was one of ‘our officers’ in this case,” Jon frowns, rubbing his upper arm. The sling came off a week ago, but it’s still bandaged and he’s been complaining about the fit of his suit jacket for days.

Dan continues walking due northeast. “Question still stands.”

Jon sighs, squinting under his large dark sunglasses. “You’re betting your career on an anonymous tip.”

“An anonymous tip that charmed its way through the switchboard,” Dan points out, for the third time.

Jon makes a full circle again, tripping over his own feet as he twists to take in the full docks. “If this isn’t a trap, I’ll eat my own badge.”

“I hope you have an iron stomach,” Dan says, absently, as he reaches the closest building. It’s an old, crumbling wooden shack with what used to be the harbor master’s logo painted on the side. There’s an oak plank, four from the bottom, that looks newly chipped. “Come look at this.”

Jon sighs, glancing behind him as he walks over. “Come here, Jon. Turn your back, Jon. Give the crazy anonymous sniper a perfect bullseye, Jon.”

Dan pulls at the knees of his pants as he squats, reaching out to touch the edge of the wood. It’s splintered, the powder blue wood splitting around a shape the size of a bullet and, when he turns his head to the left- “Do you see this?”

With an exaggerated sigh, Jon bends down, resting his sore arm on his knees and following Dan’s fingers. “It’s a chipped old building, what am I looking at?”

Dan tightens his thighs for balance and holds out his hand. “You brought the camera?”

Jon hands it over. “By all means, take pictures while I keep watch.”

Dan futzes with the shutter until he gets it at the perfect angle for the light shining off the river and onto the side of the building. “Will you shut up and look?”

Jon sighs and, with one last look behind them, bends down to look through the viewfinder. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“A handprint.”

“Yeah.”

“What do I owe you for being wrong this time?”

“I’ll check the ledger.” Dan takes a picture, then three more. “But it definitely starts and ends with alcohol.”

Jon sighs and pulls his wallet forlornly out of his back pocket.

***

The third time Dan fucked up, he was six months out of Quantico.

Dan hadn’t entered the Academy as a rising star but he had graduated as one. He was young, hotheaded, insufferably well-read and he knew it. He wasn’t the smartest guy in the room, but he had the memory and the work ethic to make up for it. So, he worked harder than anyone in his cohort. He arrived an hour early and he left long after the sun was set. He memorized his case files, then his friends’, then every case file he could find on every desk when it was just him and the janitors and a low, flickering reading light.

So, he kept his head down and he made himself useful and, when his name was finally called, he was ready. Or, he’d thought he was ready. He was ready for the crime scenes and the grieving widows. He was ready for the internal jockeying for power and the underhanded way his colleagues handled each other. And, when the force’s most revered senior agent took Dan under his wing, Dan had thought he was ready.

Jack was fifteen years Dan’s senior, with a well-trimmed greying beard and a head of thinning hair. He was old school, loved to park them at the pier and tell Great War stories over donuts and beer. He liked to talk and he liked Dan to listen.

Dan liked him. He was too young to know the difference between affection and respect, power and attraction.

Jack was everything Dan wanted to be, and Jack believed that Dan could get there. 

So, when Jack parked at the dock a few months into their tenure, handed Dan a beer and opened his belt, Dan didn’t hesitate. He dropped his head, circled his lips, swallowed around his lingering regrets and froze when Jack’s hand came down, hard, on the back of his neck.

Dan’s head was still spinning when he sat up. His world was still swirling before his eyes as Jack sneered. His heart was still pounding almost loud enough to drown out the “I thought so”s and “if you want to get anywhere, son, you’ve got to take these despicable proclivities and lock them up where no one else can find them.”

Jack hung the threat of a black mark over Dan’s neck for six months, until he was killed in the field. Dan celebrated with a whiskey and had told no one.

Dan promised himself he would never do anything, again, to risk a black mark on his record.

***

Dan hears Lovett before he sees him-

“You can bluster all you want, but I’m a citizen of this country and you can’t block me just because I _look_ Jewish. I know my rights.”

\- and takes a moment for a deep breath and another to tamp down a confusing flash of anticipation before sliding his chair back. He leans in his doorway, his arms crossed across his chest, watching as Lovett berates Jon’s unsuspecting desk-mate.

Matt - a thoroughly average agent with a kind smile and a vacant stare - is tripping over his words. “I’m not- the FBI doesn’t- who are you again?”

Lovett taps his knuckles against the edge of Matt’s desk. “Jonathan Ira Lovett. I run Swamp Souls. You’re Bureau is investigating me, you should know who I am.”

“We’re investigating you?” Matt’s eyes widen and his knee bounces.

“Yes.” Lovett narrows his eyes. “Are you sure you work here?”

Matt opens his mouth, his lips wobbling a little as he searches for the proof of his badge. 

Dan finally takes pity on him, stepping into Lovett’s line of sight. “Stop terrorizing my agents.”

Matt turns around - “sorry, sir, I didn’t know you were standing there, Mr. Lovett says he knows you” - at the same time as Lovett looks up, a grin splitting his cheeks and settling high on his cheekbones and deep into his dimples - “Ahh, Agent Pfeiffer. I was trying to tell your minion that you and I are old friends. Can I call you a friend? You do keep harassing my place of business.”

“I have not been harassing anything,” Dan sighs as Matt’s eyes widen in concern. “Get in here, before you start spreading rumors.”

Lovett pushes off from the desk, waving at Matt as he saunters into Dan’s office, sucking in his stomach to squeeze past the doorway. “You should hire less-corruptible minions. He was going to let me through any minute.”

Dan shuts his door loudly behind Lovett’s ankles, flinching at Matt’s worried head tilt. “That mouth gets you in trouble a lot.”

“How did you know?”

“Educated guess.” Dan crosses to the other side of his desk and leans against the edge, rapping his fingers against the open folder. Resnik’s folder. “What are you doing here?”

“I have some information for you.”

Dan raises an eyebrow. “For me?”

“Well,” Lovett takes his hat off and twists it between his fingers, “not so much me giving you information as me asking you for some. Have you found anything new in the Resnik case recently?”

Dan’s eyes narrow.

“As a concerned citizen, of course.”

“Of course,” Dan parrots. “Hey, you don’t happen to have a phone disruptor in your office?”

“I _am_ an amateur inventor, in my free time,” Lovett raises his eyebrows over flushed cheeks. Dan notes a spot on Lovett’s right jaw where he missed a shave. “But, phone disruptors are awfully difficult to engineer.”

“They are,” Dan agrees. “And anyone creating one would be subject to search and seizure, in conjunction with Article-”

“Woah, woah.” Lovett holds up his hands, cutting Dan off before he can make up a relevant federal statute. “Let’s not jump to any conclusions. I just run a humble soul agency.”

Dan snorts. “There is nothing humble about you.”

“Now, here’s the thing I find so difficult about you, Agent Pfeiffer.” Lovett leans forward and Dan realizes, with a start, how little space there is between them. “I never know if you’re threatening or flirting with me.”

“The former, I assure you.”

Lovett raises an eyebrow and, this close, Dan can see every disordered line of his brow and the way his smirk creases his cheeks and gives him away. “The agent doth protest too much.”

“If you start quoting Romeo and Juliet, I swear to god-”

“Two people,” Lovett says, his mouth twisting around _people_ in a way that’s dangerously familiar, “falling in love against every odd? I kinda like the sound of that.”

Dan follows flashes of gold and green as they blaze across Lovett’s murky eyes. He swallows. “Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy.”

Lovett shrugs. “I like our chances.”

Dan snorts. “Careful, your wings are melting.”

“Careful, your metaphors are mixing.” Lovett tips on his heels, rocking backwards.

Dan feels a ridiculous urge to follow him, to rise onto his toes and lean forward and-

The door opens, Jon’s voice preceding his body - “You owe me a $5 bribe and, still, I had to literally sit on Elijah’s desk to ensure he printed ours first” - his head down and his tone a lighter side of annoyance. He stops a foot inside the room, his eyes rising a step ahead of his eyebrow. “Mr. Lovett, what brings you to the FBI?”

Lovett nods at the folder in Jon’s hand. “Is that from the Resnik crime scene?”

“Ahh.” Jon looks from Lovett to the folder.

Lovett snaps his fingers. “Let me see it.”

“We’re no longer investigating the Resnik case,” Jon says, a beat too late and an octave too high. He drops the folder, photo-up, on Dan’s desk so he can cross his arms across his chest. “Outside of our jurisdiction.”

Jon realizes his mistake a moment before Lovett does and groans.

“Interesting,” Lovett smirks. “Thank you for your insight, Agent Favreau, you’ve done the Bureau proud today.”

Dan sighs in exasperation, looking down at the photo of the handprint they’d found at the crime scene, blown up and clearer in contrasting black and white. He can hear commotion in the bullpen and he tries - “We were actually just heading out for department-wide happy hour, so if you’d like to leave your card with our secretary, I’ll have someone who isn’t Matt call you if we find out anything new” - to get Lovett out of his office with enough time to spare for a look at the photos.

Lovett’s eyes flick to the business card still sitting on the edge of Dan’s desk and pushes. “I like beer.”

Dan reaches for the business card, shoving it deep into his pocket.

“Well, not beer so much, but vodka. They have vodka, right?”

Jon snorts. “Presumably.”

“Agent Pfeiffer?” Matt peers into the room, his cheeks still flushed and his eyes darting around the room at everywhere but the visitor’s chair. “The Director would like to see you.”

Dan sighs, reaching for his suit jacket. “Tell the boys I’ll be a few minutes behind them.” He struggles into the sleeves and glares at Lovett. “Don’t touch anything.”

Lovett makes an exaggerated and semi-offensive ‘aye aye’ motion.

Dan backs out of the room, watching them as long as he can, before turning on his heels.

He wishes he could say he’s surprised that the photo’s gone when he gets back to his office.

***

Jon and Alyssa are ensconced in their normal booth at The Tabard, Lovett between them. His leg is pulled up under him, his body angled towards Alyssa’s, and a glass dangling from his fingers, like he belongs there, a matchmaker between two hardened FBI agents.

“You can think that way, sure,” Jon’s saying when Dan walks in towards the tail end of Happy Hour. “But there’s something romantic about lifting your palm-” He holds his palm up and, after an awkward moment where Lovett doesn’t raise his, Alyssa holds hers against Jon’s to demonstrate- “and having your soul line mirrored perfectly by your partner’s.”

Alyssa pulls her hand back to trace the twisting, winding line that weaves across her palm. “Definitely not yours.”

Lovett snorts into his vodka twist. “Jon has the purest soul line I’ve ever seen.”

Jon frowns, straightening out his palm. His line cuts in a perfect, unbroken arch, from the heel to the pad of his index finger. “What does that mean?”

Lovett shrugs. “How the fuck should I know?”

“You run a _Soul Agency_.” Jon takes a long sip of his drink so that, when he purses his lips, they shine in the low lamp light.

“In a series of unexpected and debatably lucky circumstances, I _inherited_ a Soul Agency,” Lovett corrects. “I never had any intention of impersonating my grandmother’s Yenta.”

“I don’t know why.” Alyssa giggles into her wrist. “You’ve got all the characteristics. Bossy.”

“Hey,” Lovett complains.

Jon grins and adds, “obsessed with feeding us,” motioning towards the charcuterie plate between them.

Lovett swings his eyes towards Jon but catches on Dan’s halfway. Lovett flinches, barely perceptible if Dan wasn’t trained to read every inch of a mark’s body language, and slowly carries on to look at Jon as he repeats, “hey now.”

“Meddle in places you don’t belong.” Alyssa raises an eyebrow.

“These feel an awful lot like an attack,” Lovett grumbles.

Jon drops his head back to laugh. “That’s because it is one.”

“When the shoe fits,” Dan agrees. Jon jumps, his cheeks turning a healthy flush that Dan can only hope means he knows the trouble he’s miring them both in. Alyssa grins, reaching out to wrap her fingers around Dan’s wrist, her fingers cold and clammy from the sweat on her glass.

Lovett manages a passable look of surprise, before holding up his drink. “Perfect timing. I’m in need of a refill and you,” he nods pointedly at Dan’s empty hands, “are in need of a starter. If you’ll excuse me, Madam Matros- Mastra- Fuck, forgetting your name really ruins my smooth exit.”

“That was supposed to be smooth?” Jon raises an eyebrow.

“Mastromonaco,” Alyssa provides. “But call me Alyssa, please.”

“Alyssa it is.” Lovett motions for Jon to stay and steps over his legs. It’s not graceful but it’s not not, either, and Dan’s eyes flick to Lovett’s core muscles, hidden under layers of cotton, before he can stop himself.

Jon frowns, holding his hand up to help Lovett jump. “I could have gone to the bar.”

“No need.” Lovett bypasses Jon’s proffered hand and clears the booth, landing with a happy ‘umph.’ “Anyone need another drink?”

Jon holds up his half-full bottle, “I’m good,” and Alyssa looks forlornly at her martini, “I’ve gotta drive home in a bit.”

“Your loss,” Lovett grins, walking the first few steps from the table backwards, a smirk plastered on his face. As they sink into the crowd though, he turns on his heel, his shoulders slumping next to Dan’s and his smirk sliding into a bemused shrug. “If you’re going to yell at me, I figured we might as well do it out of earshot.”

Dan stops at the bar. “At least someone knows how inappropriate it is for the leading suspect in a murder case to be breaking bread with the fucking FBI. You want another vodka twist?”

Lovett looks down at his glass, “sure,” then frowns. “Leading suspect?”

Dan leans over the counter to order both their drinks, then turns to Lovett leaning his hip against the brass railing. “All evidence is pointing that way.”

Lovett brushes a curl off his forehead. He looks out of place, in a pale purple button-down that’s wrinkled and rolled up to his elbows and fading grey pants that hang loose around his thighs. “Name one piece of evidence.”

Dan holds up his fist and holds out his index finger. “One, you’re making buddy-buddy with the junior agent and the coroner on your case.”

“Alyssa’s a coroner?” Lovett raises an eyebrow, his eyes flecked with gold as they widen. “She hides it so well.”

“Two,” Dan continues, holding out his middle finger. “You called in a semi-anonymous tip with information about the case no innocent man should have.”

“I never created a disruptor,” Lovett says, swallowing hard enough that his Adam’s apple bobs. Not totally innocent then, Dan notes, whichever way this falls. “But if you want to call a ball of tinfoil and a Dixie cup with the bottom cut out innovative- I never turn down a compliment.”

Dan holds out his ring finger. “Three, you stole the latest crime scene photo.”

“I-”

“From under the nose of the fucking FBI,” Dan continues, unabated. “You have balls, I’ll give you that.”

“I didn’t kill her.” Lovett meets his eyes and holds them. Dan feels it shiver down his spine. “I swear I didn’t.”

Dan sighs. “For some reason I know will come back to bite me later, I do believe you.”

Lovett’s grin splits his face, rounding his cheeks and settling in his temples. “Good.”

“But,” Dan shakes his head, “you might want to stop doing things that make you look guilty. Not all agents are as magnanimous as I am.”

“This is what goes for magnanimity in the FBI?”

“Extremely.”

“Good to know.” Lovett’s smirk doesn’t slide from his face as the bartender comes with their drinks. “I’m glad you’re the agent I got, then.”

Dan pulls a bill from his pocket and hands it to the bartender with a wave to keep the change. “Were you questioning it?”

Lovett shrugs. “Work with the agent you’ve got, not the one you want.”

“Is that a reference to my brusk but efficient attitude?” Dan raises an eyebrow, reaching for their drinks. He holds Lovett’s out, shivering as Lovett’s fingers brush against him.

“It’s a reference to Agent Favreau’s abs,” Lovett challenges.

Dan has the urge to look around to make sure the rest of his agents really have left happy hour early, but he keeps his eyes trained on Lovett. Which is the only reason, he’s almost certain, that he catches the flash of skin as Lovett takes his drink and pulls it up for a long sip.

All thoughts of checking for other agents fly out the window as Dan reaches forward, taking Lovett’s hand in his and turning it over. There’s a large scar bifurcating his palm, stretching from thumb to ring finger. Dan can see just the edges of his soul line before it disappears into scar tissue. “What happened?” He whispers, barely loud enough to be heard.

Lovett, though, has caught his breath, his eyes dark and shadowed as he watches Dan’s thumb inch towards the broken remnants of his soul line. “Accident.”

Dan hasn’t looked at his own soul line in years, hasn’t showed it to anyone else in decades, but he can’t imagine not knowing that it was there. An ever-present, fate-approved path to a love that society will never allow him to take, but will always be there. “Do you remember what it looked like?”

Lovett shrugs, motioning to the center of the scar. “There was a twist here and a bit of a crook there, but, honestly? I was nine.”

Dan swallows, opening his mouth to say something - _sorry_, probably, or something equally inappropriate - but he’s cut off before he can make a fool of himself.

“A twist,” Lovett repeats, his eyes widening and the shadow passing as curiosity lights every dip and curve of his face. He pulls his hand back. “Sorry, I’ve gotta go.”

“Now?” Dan asks, his hand still held out, blazing where Lovett’s hand was just moments ago. “We just got drinks.”

“I’ll pay you back.” Lovett tries to look apologetic, but an excitement thrums just under his skin. “But now, I’ve gotta-” He motions with his hand, curling his fingers so that the scar is barely visible, and takes a step back into the crowd.

“Lovett-”

“Pleasure as always, Agent Pfeiffer,” Lovett salutes, and then he’s gone.

Dan watches him go for as long as possible, and then watches the crowd fill in the place he’s left for much longer. He considers going back to the table. He considers ordering a round for the bar on the FBI’s tab. He considers going home, picking up the political thriller he’s been reading for three weeks, now, and forcing all of this out of his mind.

But the feel of Lovett’s fingers linger, warm and clammy against his. He can still feel Lovett’s palm, scared and warm and only shaking a little in Dan’s. The feel of Lovett’s eyes and the lilt of his laughter still simmer and spark across his skin.

Dan down his drink in one go and follows Lovett out of the bar.

***

The park is dark, one out of every three streetlights dampened with neglect. Dan digs his hands into his pockets, curling his shoulders inwards and wishing it wasn’t quite so humid under his jacket and tie.

Dan hasn’t ever dared to come here. Not even during his first days in DC, during those innocent few months between the Academy and Jack when Dan had felt invincible. He’s heard about it, though, on police blotters and through case write-ups. The grove of trees to the left of the fifth broken lamppost. The bathroom that’s had an ‘out of order’ sign up for months but has never been reported. The handkerchief, with its nuanced color code that the FBI hasn’t quite cracked.

Dan loosens his tie, folding it into a small square in his back pocket. It’s not perfect, not even close, but Dan hopes his meaning is clear enough.

Then he straightens his shoulders and starts counting broken lamp posts. One, at the entrance, with a young couple making out beneath it, the boy’s hands bunched in his date’s skirts, and Dan bites back the urge to tell him to take her some place nicer. Two, a little further in, high-pitched giggles rending the quiet of the night in two. Three, further in, dark and peaceful. Four, even further in, the peace pushing and pulling towards something darker, more secret, tipping from peaceful into dangerous. Five, thick with possibility, but empty, or, empty as far as Dan can tell as he walks quickly past.

Dan gets to eight, circling towards the far entrance, before he turns on his heel and walks back. He slows down this time, spreading out his strides until he feels like he’s focusing so hard on walking slowly that he’s forgotten how to walk at all.

No one’s at the fifth lamp post, though, until his third pass, and then three men are standing to the left of the path. All three are leaning, casually, against tree trunks, a knee drawn up and sleeves rolled up their biceps. Dan pauses long enough for the closest to frown, his long, muscled thigh bunching under his jeans, ready to slide back into the shadows.

Dan shakes his head, clearing his mind long enough to take them in in a quick sweep. The first, long, lanky, tall and lithe. The second built, with a chest strong enough to crush him and thighs larger than the tree he’s leaning against. The third shorter, with stocky shoulders that taper down to the swell of his ass and dark curls falling out of his beanie.

Dan nods at the third before he even realizes he’s doing it.

The man smirks, sliding into the dark and Dan swallows, his eyes flicking to the other two before sliding into the dark after him. The air feels, suddenly, even warmer as Dan’s feet crunch across fallen leaves and discarded pine cones. He can feel the sweat pooling under his armpits, in the crooks of his elbows, behind his knees, and he wishes he’d taken the time to spritz a little cologne on to mask the mix of bar smoke and his own musk.

It doesn’t matter, though. He’s barely climbed the three steps into the out-of-order bathroom, his knees shaking violently and his breath coming in arrhythmic puffs, when he’s pushed into a stall, a strong forearm at his neck.

“Are you a cop?”

Dan swallows around the arm at his neck. The guy is stronger than he looked at first glance. “I’m not going to turn you in,” Dan promises. His voice shakes at the edge of what isn’t quite a lie, and he’s absolutely certain that the guy will call his bluff.

But it must be enough, because in the next move, the guy is squatting, his pants pulling across his thighs as he balances on his heels to avoid the grime on the floor. Dan wonders, briefly, how many men have been in this stall since the last time it was cleaned.

Then the guy’s hands are at Dan’s belt. The metal clicks obscenely in the quiet of the bathroom and Dan focuses on the trickle of water leaking from a sink and the rustle of the trees outside rather than the rush of humid air as his dick slides out from his boxers. He’s already half hard and it doesn’t take more than a few, calloused jerks to get him all the way there.

Dan teeters between the thrill of someone else’s hand - warm and masculine, jerking him harder and slower than Dan does for himself but all the hotter for its unfamiliarity - and the fear of getting caught. He strains for the sounds of footsteps, jumps every time the wood creaks, clenches his fingers when he can’t tell the murmur of voices from the whisper of the wind. 

“Relax.” The guy squeezes Dan’s thigh, and then he’s opening his mouth, pulling Dan in and down, his mouth impossibly warm and his tongue agile.

Dan groans, closing his eyes. He can feel the porcelain edge of the toilet against the backs of his knees. He can feel the rotting splinters of the wood under his fingernails. He can feel the trembling in his own thighs and the thrum of the guy’s hand on his leg.

When he reaches down, tangling his fingers in the guy’s curls, he can hear the catch of breath and he can feel it in the guy’s throat as he contracts around Dan. They’re not quite right - too short, too blonde, too coarse - but Dan’s mind supplies it anyway. The edge of a sweaty curl against Lovett’s forehead and the catch of his breath as Dan took his palm. The flush in his cheeks when Dan makes him laugh, spreading all the way down Lovett’s shoulders, his chest, further, further, until it disappears into a small patch of coarser curls. The smell of him, musky and masculine, heightened as Dan pulls him close, sucks him down, makes his whole body tremble around him.

Dan comes with a start, lost in a memory that will never be. He barely manages a warning, a quick tug of curls so that the guy can grab a wad of toilet paper. He bites his own wrist, burying Lovett’s name into the secret of his skin.

“Sorry,” Dan breathes, not sure if he really means it, but needing to apologize to someone, even if he can never apologize to the person who deserves it.

The guy shrugs, sliding up and shaking out his legs. “Not a hardship.” He tosses the toilet paper into the toilet behind Dan and reaches around him to flush it.

Despite himself, Dan flinches away from his arm. His skin feels clammy under his cotton shirt and he feels stripped and vulnerable. He tucks himself back in quickly, offering one more, quick, “sorry,” as he sidesteps the guy and pushes out of the stall.

The guy shrugs again, and doesn’t even look up as Dan stumbles into the dark of the night.

***

Dan’s putting his briefcase on his desk chair the next morning when Axe knocks on his door jamb. “Pfeiffer, my office.”

Dan forces his voice steady, “yes, sir,” and focuses his feet to walk in a straight line behind Axe. He’s grateful that he stopped for a coffee on the way in, both to overcome his sleepless night and for something to do with his hands. 

Axe crosses directly to his desk and Dan closes the door behind him without being asked, hearing it click closed with his career on the other side.

“You’re my best agent,” Axe starts, sitting in his chair with a deep sigh and crossing his ankles on the edge of his desk.

Dan hovers by the guest chair, before sitting on the edge, his back straight. “Yes, sir.”

“And you know it.” Axe raises an eyebrow and holds up his hand. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s admirable. I was like that when I was a young agent.”

Dan ducks his head, part in deference and part because he can already feel the wave of Axe’s disappointment building in the near distance. “Thank you, sir.”

“That’s what drew me to you. I see so much of myself in you, it’s been easy to groom you.”

Dan’s eyes go faux wide. He hadn’t _known_-known, but the extra case load and his frequent fill-ins for departmental meetings hasn’t passed Dan by. He may be hell-bent on destroying his own career, but he’s not stupid.

“Don’t play that.” Axe rolls his eyes. “I know that you know. Which is why-”

Dan swallows. Here it comes. He wishes he knew if it was the guy who blew him or one of the others who turned him in. Perhaps the teenagers, undercover? If he’s lucky, he’ll end up with a lavender triangle affixed to every one of his official documents. If he’s unlucky, he’ll end up with a black mark and a dishonorable expulsion from the Bureau. Dan squeezes his cup so hard that coffee spills over the edge to burn his fingers.

“-I don’t understand why you’d defy direct orders from the fucking CIA.”

Dan lets go of everything - the bunching of his thighs, the clenching of his teeth, the grip on his cup - and his entire body sags in relief. “Oh, that.”

Axe narrows his eyes as he parrots, “‘oh, that.’ Yes, oh that! Agent Rhodes gave very clear, easy to follow and, I think, reasonable instructions.”

Dan tries to shrug, but his body is too loose to be convincing. “I received a new tip. They didn’t seem so reasonable in the new light.”

“If it was coming from upstairs, I could protect you,” Axe continues, unabated. “But we don’t outrank the CIA. This comes down from on high. I can’t cover your stupid ass anymore.”

Dan forces feeling back into his limbs and takes a scalding hot and fortifying sip of coffee. His fingers sting from the burn. “What do you want me to do?”

“_I_,” Axe emphasizes, leaning forward to grab the top file off a stack on his desk, “am going to destroy the Resnik file. And you are going to step the fuck off the gas, keep your head down, solve the damn Sheffield case, and escape this whole mess without a fucking black mark on your record.”

Dan swallows, the hairs rising on the back of his neck. “Yes, sir.”

Axe’s eyes narrow even further. “Message received this time?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Good.” Axe drops the entire Resnik file into the garbage. “Would be a shame to lose such a good agent, but, the Bureau would survive a whole fucking lot better than you would.”

“Yes, sir,” Dan repeats. “Of course, sir.”

Axe rolls his eyes. “Then get, out of my office, and if I see you back in here before your mid-year review, it’ll be too soon.”

Dan nods, “thank you, sir,” and pushes back so quickly that the chair wobbles on its legs for a few moments. He closes the door behind him, leaning against it and closing his eyes as he wills his legs to stop shaking and his heart to stop beating so quickly.

His career is still intact.

His secret is still his.

All he has to do is forget Katie Resnik and Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett with his head of curls and his shining eyes and the smirk that lights up his entire body and-

No.

Dan’s done with thoughts like that.

Dan is going to be the next director of the field division of the FBI. He’s going to do what he’s told, fall in line, finish the year out with a clear and unblemished record.

His palm burns, slightly, and he rubs the length of his soul line with his thumb as he opens his eyes again. The bullpen bustles around him, full of good, competent agents with nothing to hide. 

Dan slides off the wall and slips in-between them.


	3. PART III

“You look like you could use this.” Jon dangles a large cup of coffee in front of Dan’s eyes. When Dan pauses, he adds. “It’s from the place you like.”

Dan takes it. “I look that bad?” 

Jon shrugs, “do you want me to lie?,” and steps over Dan’s knees, his pants bunching and pulling around his thighs, already a little wrinkled for this early in the morning.

Dan frowns. Jon spends an exorbitant amount of his pitiful paycheck on weekly dry cleaning and he’s usually the best-pressed and best-steamed agent in the building. “Lying would be preferable, yes.”

“Then you look great,” Jon grins, his voice tilting up at the end just to ensure Dan knows he’s lying, “bright as a spring chicken.”

“What the fuck kind of metaphor is that?” Dan takes a fortifying sip of his coffee, clutching his fingers around the base to keep them from shaking with exhaustion. Caffeine does wonders to cover his fortnight of sleepless nights - hours spent tossing and turning while he tries to ignore the burning in his palm and the flash of Lovett’s smirk and the feel of a mouth between his legs - but little to mask the subsequent jitters.

Jon shrugs, crossing his legs and bouncing his loose foot. “I’m trying something new.”

“Stop trying.” Dan shakes his head and ends with a nod towards the wrinkles bunching over his knee. Dan lowers his voice. “If you need an advance, you know all you need to do is ask?”

“Good morning gentleman.” Axe steps to the front of the room, leaning heavily against the podium. “We have a heavy case load this week, so if you could all settle down.”

Jon’s eyes flick from Axe to Dan, and he lowers his voice, too. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dan motions towards Jon’s pants. “The dry cleaner.”

Jon’s face twists, an interesting shade of red filling in the new wrinkles. “Oh. No. I-”

“Is there something more important you’d like to discuss, Agent Favreau?” Axe raises his voice. “Because we’re all listening.”

Jon flushes all the way down his neck and under his collar which, Dan notes with a frown, is flecked with dirt. “No, sir, sorry, sir.”

“If you and Agent Pfeiffer don’t have enough to do, I can take care of that.” Axe’s eyes narrow. “I’m putting you on the O’Malley case.”

Dan has the decency to bite his lip, but Jon doesn’t hold back a groan. Dan glares a warning at him as he clears his own throat, “we’re still finishing up the Sheffield case, sir.”

“Then I suggest you hurry it up.” Axe raises a challenging eyebrow. “You’ve got a backlog.”

Dan opens his mouth, but he’s only two weeks into his reprieve, and he closes it again without arguing back.

Jon crosses his arms, making sure to jab Dan’s ribs with his elbow. He drops his voice even lower. “Thanks for that.”

“Not my fault you don’t know how to modulate your voice,” Dan mutters back, out of the corner of his mouth.

“I’m not running low on money,” Jon growls.

“I wasn’t commenting on your ability to provide or what the fuck ever.” Dan sighs, taking another sip of his coffee and another tactic. “What’s her name?”

Jon splutters.

“I can give you a third case, Agent Favreau.”

Jon raises his hand in apology. “Sorry, Director, just a little something caught in my throat.” He waits until Axe’s gaze has passed them and then glares at Dan, his voice low and clipped. “I was up early for a little reconnaissance, if you must know.”

Dan frowns, waiting for Axe to finish up before turning in his seat. “I thought the Sheffield case was almost wrapped up.”

“It is.”

Jon won’t meet his eyes and Dan’s second sense pulls and tugs for his attention. “Jon-”

Jon uncrosses his legs and crosses them the other way. “It wasn’t for the Sheffield case.”

“Jon.”

“Hey, assholes,” Elijah leans forward from the chair behind them, dipping his own on its front legs. “If you can get over whatever this is,” he motions between Jon and Dan, “for long enough to win some money, you up for monthly night poker?”

Dan forces his gaze from Jon to raise a challenging eyebrow. “Bold to think I won’t clean the floor with you.”

“Oh,” Elijah grins, “I’ve got a secret weapon this time.”

Jon frowns. “Wanna enlighten us?”

“Not really.” Elijah shrugs. “Bring your wallets and a clean deck of cards and you might find out.”

Jon rolls his eyes.

Dan chuckles. “As long as we’re not stuck on this case, we’re in.”

“Great.” Elijah straightens up, squeezing both their shoulders. “Ciao, gentleman.”

“Come on,” Jon says, already standing and very carefully smoothing out the wrinkles in his pants, “we’ve got a backlog, apparently.”

Dan sighs and stands to follow him, letting his concerns drop. For now.

***

"Stop moving," Priyanka orders, her voice muffled around a mouthful of pins. "I can't guarantee I won't poke you."

Jon frowns down at her, holding his leg steady so she can pin the hem of his pants. "You're the worst seamstress."

"Wasn't my first choice." Pri stabs a needle into the pinstripe fabric and Jon winces. "But if the Bureau won't let women be agents, I've gotta serve any way I can."

"Sadist," Jon grumbles. "You know I outrank you?"

"Who's holding the needles?" Dan asks, turning the page of the O’Malley file without looking up.

Pri smirks and rolls her stool towards his other ankle. "I am."

Jon holds out his foot and winces again. "Who holds the gun?"

"If I had my way?" Dan memorizes the O’Malley’s Pub’s restaurant deed and flips the page again. "Priyanka would be."

Jon glares as Pri stabs at his ankle, harder than necessary. “Not my fault the FBI is run by backwoods misogynistic assholes,” he grumbles.

She shrugs and wipes at the small dot of Jon’s blood with the handkerchief Dan holds out for her. “If you’re not working against them, you’re working with them.”

Dan smirks and flips to the next page. “Exactly.”

Jon sighs and, as Pri pulls at his cuffs, holds out his wrist. “Since you want to trade me in, anyway, what’ve we got?”

Dan turns back to the front of the file and starts summarizing. “O’Malley’s Pub, long thought to be a front for the Blacks. Agents Wood and Barrow were undercover a couple months ago and they believe, with a high level of confidence, that there’s a trap door in the wine cellar-”

“Exactly where I’d keep my diamonds stash,” Pri nods seriously through the pins in her mouth.

“Cocaine,” Jon corrects. “The Port Authority tracks diamonds too closely to make ferrying them a good investment.”

Jon groans as Pri twists her hand.

“Sorry,” she says, primly, “my hand slipped. I’m so clumsy. Women, you know?”

Jon glares. “You have the wrong idea about me.”

“Prove it,” she shrugs.

“Children,” Dan interrupts. “We’re on the same team here. Jon, you and I are posing as newly-minted San Francisco vintners, fresh off the train from the West Coast looking to peddle our wine to DC’s greatest establishments.”

“I don’t know anything about wine.”

“I do.” Priyanka grins smugly. “And if you hold still, I might even teach you.”

Jon sighs and holds himself stock still.

“Good boy,” Pri smirks. “Now, what do you know about Pinot Noirs?”

***

Dan closes his hand of cards and wraps his knuckles against the table. Pass, again.

This hasn’t been his night. It hasn’t been his night since he was dealt a pile of multi-suited low-number garbage in the first round. It hasn’t been his night, really, since he saw the guard outside of Elijah’s storage room-turned game night - only ever posted if someone warranting a guard is playing - and it _definitely_ hasn’t been his night since he walked in to find out that the VIP wasn’t even Axe, but Ben fucking Rhodes.

Dan taps his useless cards between the table and his palm, enjoying the sharp twinge every time an edge catches his soul line.

He hasn’t seen Axe since that fateful morning, when he’d been so convinced that a reckless fifteen minute blowjob in DC’s filthiest restroom would warrant him a lavender discharge. He’s still reeling from the relief, mixed with the very real danger of the black mark Axe had dangled over his career unless he sucked it up, zipped his mouth, and followed the orders of the damn sultan of the CIA.

Dan hasn’t seen Ben since that first ultimatum, so many weeks ago now. And Jon- well, Dan hadn’t realized that Jon knew Ben at all, until he sat across from him, folded his legs gracefully, and glared through the first ten rounds of poker.

“Always were lousy at poker,” Ben smirks at him, throwing down a flush of diamonds to beat Jon’s straight. “Remember that night I won a couple hundred off you and Vietor?”

Jon reaches for the cards to shuffle. “And traded it in for a few minutes of skinny dipping.”

Ben tips his head back and laughs. “Worth every penny to see your white asses glinting off the Potomac.”

Dan glances down at his hand. A couple low clubs, a two of spades, and the queen of hearts. He sighs and taps his fist against the table to pass.

The others pass. Ben calls.

“I raise you two,” Jon raises an eyebrow at Ben as he slides his chips across the table, “and a question.”

Ben mirrors his eyebrow. “I know your tell, Favreau.”

Jon shrugs. “In or out, Rhodes.”

Ben leans forward, “only because I want to know what the fuck you want to waste such a good hand on asking,” and lays his cards out.

A pair of jacks. Dan’s heart is already pounding with every detective instinct in his bloodstream before Jon throws down his own. A royal flush. Ben was right, Jon blew the best hand in the lowest stake game of the night.

Jon sweeps up his meager winnings and takes a deep breath. “And a question?”

Ben nods. “That was the bet.”

Jon looks up, his eyes blazing, and Dan knows what he’s going to ask before he says it, but not far enough before to stop it happening. “I want to know what happened to Tommy Vietor.”

Ben tugs at the curve of his ear. He has a tell, too. “I know what you know. One day, he was at Quantico with us. The next day, he wasn’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s a shame for you.”

“That’s a shame for Tommy,” Jon corrects. “He’s in trouble and if you were ever really his friend-”

Ben’s eyes narrow. “You’re so far out of your depth here, Favreau. Leave it.”

“No.” Jon crosses his arms, his shoulders straightening. “Not this time. Not again.”

“Jon,” Ben warns.

“You know what your problem is?” Jon glares. “You’ve always thought you were smarter than everyone else.”

“I don’t,” Ben sighs. “I’m not. I don’t have to be smarter than you to beat you.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means-” Ben shakes his head. “It means that I don’t need to outsmart you. I just have to look at you and I know every fucking thing you’re planning.”

Jon opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. “That might have been true then, but it’s not true now.”

Ben raises an eyebrow towards Jon’s hand. “That thing you do, with your ring finger?”

Jon looks down at where he’s twisting the skin around the base of his finger.

“That means you’re nervous. A pair, maybe two.” Ben reaches for the deck and starts to shuffle. “Then, the way you track me with your eyes- yeah, just like that. That means I’m your target, whether I have the best hand or not. You always were the most obstinate bastard I know.”

Jon drops his hands into his lap.

“And when you massage your soul line?” Ben makes a bridge, letting the cards fall slowly before he hands the deck to Elijah to cut. “Well, that hasn’t changed since Quantico, has it?”

Jon swallows. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Ben takes the cards back. “Yes, I have.”

“If that’s the way you’re going to play this,” Jon huffs, pushing his chair back, “then I’m out.”

“What a shame,” Ben says, without looking up.

Jon’s chair rattles. The door slams.

Dan slides out of his chair. “Well, this has been fun, gentlemen, and lady.” He nods at Priyanka. “But I have an early morning. Do try not to miss me too much.”

“I’ll miss your money.” Ben keeps shuffling as he looks up, catching Dan’s eyes with an expression Dan can’t quite decipher. “You, not so much.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Dan shrugs, covering his mind full of questions as he grabs Jon’s suit jacket off the back of his chair. He keeps his gate steady and calm until the door clicks shut behind him. Then he turns to the guard and asks, a lot less calmly, “a young scowling agent come through here a few minutes ago?”

The guard nods and points up the stairs to the left.

“Good man,” Dan tells him, and takes the stairs two at a time.

Dan keeps a careful ten feet between them as Jon dons his hat and slips out of the FBI building. He walks quickly, checking around him before ducking into the Metro. Dan stays a car length back, his eyes trained on Jon’s tall head, the sweat beating on his brow, his dark features in profile.

For all the time that Dan’s known him, Jon’s been an open book. Ben isn’t wrong; Jon wears his heart on his sleeve and telegraphs his next move in every inch of his shoulders. While it’s gotten him in trouble - the new arm wound from Tommy Vietor being only the latest example - Dan’s always appreciated that about Jon. Dan always knows where he stands, good or bad, and it certainly hasn’t always been good.

It certainly isn’t good right now.

Jon’s disapproval about their removal from the Resnik case has never been opaque, but Dan’s never seen him go after anyone like he did Special Agent Ben Rhodes. Their argument clearly built on a history of animosity and disappointment and something that, under it all, looks an awful lot like squandered friendship. Not for the first time, Dan considers calling in a few favors to get their records from Quantico. If only he could find a way to do it without raising suspicions.

Dan pushes the thought away, though, as Jon takes the next exit. He rushes to follow, only pausing to pull his hat lower over his eyes and tug his FBI badge from his front pocket and shoving it haphazardly into a back one, far from view.

Dan knows where Jon’s headed when they’re a block and a half away and he only hopes that Jon has the wherewithal not to enter the Black’s stronghold without backup. Instead, he has the sense - as sensibly as it can be to spy on the Blacks, in Blacks country, in the pre-dawn and post-dusk moments of the longest and most humid DC days - to duck behind a bush to watch.

Dan flattens himself against the building, two bushes down, and is eminently grateful that they don’t have to wait long before a group of Blacks tumble out, all laughing loudly and singing an Irish sea shanty. “She’s got your name on it,” a tanned man with a red tuft of hair is saying, his fingers squeezes around Vietor’s shoulder. “The things she can do with her hips, _man_, it’s perfection. You’ll forget about the Resnik girl in a second, guaranteed.”

Tommy Vietor’s pale skin pales even further. “I’m wasted, I’ve gotta get vertical,” he says, wiping a sweaty lock of blond hair off his forehead.

“Not even for a few songs?”

Vietor shakes his head and stumbles forward, knocking into the guy’s chest. “Sorry, Miles, I couldn’t get it up if she was the prettiest girl in the District.”

Dan watches Jon watch Vietor. Jon’s shoulders are tight, his muscles rippling under his blaringly white dress shirt. His mouth twists, his thighs poised to jump up, one hand clenched into the dirt and the other rubbing absently along his soul line.

“Shame, man,” Miles taps Victor's chest.

“Yeah,” Vietor sighs. He walks backwards from the group, giving an exaggerated salute. Then, as he turns the corner out of sight, he straightens, his gate sobering and his piercing blue eyes clearing. 

Dan pushes back into the bushes, straightening his back against the building. He waits until the crowd in front of the Cyprus disperses, then he waits even longer as Jon straightens carefully out of his own hiding place and heads in the direction of his apartment. Dan sighs and glances at his watch. It’s late, late enough that the Metro is closed and he’s a good twenty blocks from his house. 

Dan shakes out his knees - knowing, now, where Jon’s been getting wrinkled and dirty before work - and starts walking off the extra donut he’d eaten at poker night.

***

Dan spends most of the next few days trying to find the right time to bring up Jon’s unauthorized, highly dangerous, and absurdly idiotic surveillance of the District’s most dangerous gang. He still hasn’t found a good moment, though, when Friday night rolls around and they find themselves in line at the Quonset Club.

Dan’s always liked the discomfort of an undercover disguise. Every time he tries to bend his elbow and the stiff fabric stops him, he’s reminded of what he’s here to do; every time he reaches up to run his fingers through his short hair and finds the hot glue of a toupee, the space between him and this persona grows. Dan settles into it, like a well-worn glove that once belonged to someone else. 

Jon, though, is fidgeting.

“You’re going to give us away,” Dan hisses out of the corner of his mouth.

Jon’s fingers twitch around his shirt sleeve, twisting the silver grape-shaped cufflinks. “This outfit is going to give us away. I look fucking ridiculous.”

“Pri’s going to get a complex if you keep disparaging her work,” Dan warns him. “You look like every other Napa Valley tycoon holding a newly-minded gold medal, in the-”

Jon glares at him as he answers, “the Decanter Awards,” just as Pri had taught them.

“Good boy.”

“This buddy-buddy routine you have going?” Jon bites out. “It’s really pulling me out of the backstory I’ve created for us.”

Dan raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Jon nods, dropping his voice, “it was a cold, dark night when we left Boston on the wagon train,” but betraying the tension as he pushes his fingers into his belt so he can straighten his starched striped dress-shirt. 

Dan keeps his eyebrow an inch or so from his new hairline. “What was I doing in Boston?”

“That’s for you to decide. You can’t expect me to do _all_ the work here,” Jon waves him away. “Anyway, it was tragic how our company contracted Yellow Fever while crossing the Rockies.”

“Why are we in wagons again?” Dan asks. “The Gold Rush was seventy years ago.”

Jon narrows his eyes. “We were late to the party.”

“We make better vintners than we do Gold Rush pioneers.”

“Exactly,” Jon nods. “Which is why you took me under your wing when my parents were among the perished. Good for you, too, because I’m the one who found the nugget of gold that we cashed in for the vineyard.”

“Or,” Dan suggests, “we were both prospectors, looking for investment opportunities. Which is a story I can actually remember.’

Jon sighs as the line moves forward. “But is way less memorable.”

“We want to be less memorable,” Dan reminds him. He pulls two dollar bills from his pocket and hands to the bouncer with the business cards Pri had mocked up to go with their suits. 

The guard waves them through without a second glance.

“Simple and vague works every time,” Dan reiterates as they step into the dark hallway.

Jon rolls his eyes. “I’m going to go get us drinks and do a round.”

Dan opens his mouth, but Jon cuts him off before he can say anything.

“And I’ll tell your boring story, don’t worry.”

Dan laughs and waves him away as they come out of the hallway into a lively jazz hall. The Quonset Club is in a converted warehouse, the one large holding room split into different sections: the bar, filled with bartenders dressed in low-cut dresses and men growing increasingly handsy as the night goes on; groups of young women, dressed in high-collared cotton dresses and white dancing gloves, giggling together as they dream of the dance floor; groups of young men, their top hats off and their money flowing, watching and calculating and making plans for when the clock strikes eleven.

Dan sets himself up at a table in the middle lands between them. He leans back, letting his pin-striped jacket fall open to reveal the expensive magenta liner. A series of lights blink overhead, casting him in shadow and relief, blinking out more and more as the empty glasses proliferate in front of him. 

“Do you know who she is?” Jon asks as he drops into the seat across from his and slides a gin and tonic across the table.

Dan follows his gaze to a young woman - blonde, of course - in the middle of the dance floor. She’s wearing a pair of tight, black pants that stick to her thighs as she dances and a blouse that gapes every time she shakes her shoulders. And she shakes her shoulders a lot. She’s not a talented dancer, but she dances with a fearlessness that’s intoxicating. Half the eyes in the room are trained on her. 

Dan sighs. She’s just the kind of attention they do not need when they’re undercover.

“You’re supposed to be at the bar,” Dan chastises, reaching for his drink. “Fuck, is there any tonic in this?”

Jon shrugs easily, “the bartender liked me.”

“Of course she did.” Dan takes another, smaller sip, and grimaces. “Did you make any other new friends?”

“A few,” Jon shrugs, dropping a much smaller stack of their business cards than he started with on the table between them. He raises a challenging eyebrow. “At least one of them must have reached a member of the Blacks.”

“Must have?”

Jon sighs and, without looking away from the dance floor, explains under his breath, “I had a conversation with Alroy. He knows who we are and he looked interested. If he doesn’t bring the information back to O’Malley, I’ll eat my own arm.”

Dan snorts. “The Director appreciates your dedication.” He takes another sip as, out of the corner of his eye, he sees a path open across the dance floor. He sighs as the blonde slides through it, winking at Jon. "Well, I'm going to go find a real drink." He reaches for the leftover business cards. "And try to pass out a few more of these."

Jon nods, absently, his eyes fixated on the woman and her dancing hips and her arm, raised high in the air, as she crooks her finger and mouths 'this is my song.'

Dan's used to losing Jon to blonde women, with more talent than either of them alone and more hutzpah than the two of them combined. Or, more accurately, Dan’s used to losing Jon to the pursuit of his soul match and the two-point-five children and the white picket fence and the security - from the law and his own expectations and the demons that haunt him when he thinks no one is looking - that a bright, smart, predictable soulmate would provide.

Dan's just as used, though, to watching Jon's face the next morning. The careful way he explains that no, no, it wasn't her, it was him. The measured smiles and forced laughter and the far away look in his eye that Dan's only _just_ starting to recognize as akin to his own.

Dan watches Jon take her hand, Jon’s so much larger and tanner next to hers, and then he turns to lean against the bar, "gin and tonic, heavy on the tonic."

"Agent Pfeiffer."

Dan freezes, lowering his arm to see Tanya next to him. Her hair is swept into a long, carefully tousled braid and she's actually wearing her three-inch heels under a perfectly-tailored pin-stripe number that suits her way better than it suits him. He swallows. "And whatever Ms. Somanader would like."

"Beer, please. Whatever you've got." She turns to him, brushing her hair out of her eyes with a pink nail. "You remember me."

"I remember faces."

"A good skill." She smiles, crossing her ankles and dipping towards him with a calculated giggle. "What brings you to the Quonset club, Agent Pfeiffer?"

Dan glances around him, clocking each face and mentally running it through his database of Blacks members. "I'd really prefer it if you didn’t call me that."

"Very well." She reaches for her glass and tips it towards him. "Thank you for the drink, Mr. -"

"Switzler," Dan provides. "Best vintner West of the Mississippi."

"Best, huh?" Tanya raises a perfect eyebrow. "I'd like to make that judgement for myself."

"Any time," Dan says, loud enough for any eavesdropping Blacks to overhear, then grabs her elbow and pulls her over to a quieter corner of the bar, making sure to dig his thumb into her pressure points. She doesn't flinch.

She does, however, wrench her arm away as they reach their high-topped table. "You don't have any wine."

"I do," Dan corrects. "It _may_ have been bought and paid for by the taxpayers of our great country."

"What a good use of funds, when half our citizens are dying."

"The economy is better than it's ever been."

"For men."

Dan tips his hat. "Too true." He glances over her shoulder at where Jon's dancing, his knees locked and his elbows loose, on the dance floor. The blonde has her head thrown back, her fingers spread on Jon’s shoulder to keep her balance. Her nails are painted the same pink as Tanya’s.

Tanya turns, the heat of her shoulders seeping into his chest. "That's Emily, isn't she something?"

Dan snorts. "She's distracting my agent."

"Don't worry," Tanya chuckles, turning back. "She's doing a job. By the end of the night, your agent will be deposited on his doorstep, unscathed."

Dan sighs. "Except for his heart."

"Oh," Tanya's eyes darken, "I think that damage was done years ago."

Dan's heart clenches around scars he'd thought long scabbed over. "What do you know?"

"I know that everyone here is playing a part." She pulls a business card out of her purse and hands it over. "And I can feel the scabs on the edges of both your soul lines."

Dan catches her eyes. "You're a soul medium.”

"I hate that term." She scrunches her nose.

"Still-"

Still, Dan understands, now, what her value is to Lovett's soul agency. Soul mediums can't feel soul matches with any level of certainty, but they can sense souls. Some have likened it to shimmering lines across the sky, like a hologram. Some have likened it more to a feeling of contentment or despair, an aura that outlines every person but can only be felt by a chosen few.

Dan's always thought it sounded like a load of bull. But, if what Tanya's saying is true- It’s taken Dan five years to start worrying about Jon’s soul match, and it only took her a few weeks.

"Still," she agrees, shaking the business card for his attention.

Dan takes it from her fingers, looking down to see a similar logo and typeface to Lovett's soul agency card. Except, this one reads _Swamp Club, every Tuesday_, over the same address as the agency.

"There's a door to the left. You can't miss it, it's painted red," Tanya continues.

Dan looks up, catching her eyes, dark and hopeful.

"Three quick raps, followed by a long one."

Dan swallows at the intensity in her voice. "And what will I find on the other side?"

She laughs, bright and clear as a wind chime. "Well, that would be cheating."

"Tanya-"

She downs the rest of her beer. "Thank you for the drink, Mr. Switzler. I hope to see you again soon."

***

Dan looks up from the business card in his hand to the crumbling building in front of him. Swamp Souls looks even worse for wear at night than it does in daylight. There’s a light flickering outside and another broken lamp across the street, sending shadows across the peeling paint and molding siding. Dan narrows his eyes, already starting to write out a strictly worded telegraph to one Tanya Somanader, when the light flickers and yes- 

There it is. Red door on the left.

Dan’s palms start to sweat and he holds the card gingerly so as not to run the ink. He steps up to the door. Three quick knocks, then he pauses.

Tanya and her goddess blonde partner might be setting him up. They might be working with the Blacks. They might have put two and two together and made Dan Pfeiffer, next in line at the DC field unit of the FBI and prime kidnapping target. They might be luring him here for a bounty. 

Or, she might have followed him, a few nights ago. She might know what he dreams about under the dark of night. The blackmail might be on _him_, rather than on the FBI.

Or the second, she and Lovett might have masterminded this from the very beginning. Dan had trusted his gut when it told him Lovett was innocent, but what if his gut had been wrong? If Lovett was Resnick’s killer, luring the FBI agent in charge of her case into the basement of a deserted building on the outskirts of town would be exactly what Dan would do.

The possibilities spin out, weaving a web that always comes back to three distinct or indistinct core goals: kidnap, blackmail, murder.

When Dan steps forward, though, all he can see is the curve of Lovett’s mouth as he laughs at his own jokes.

Dan drops his fist for the last, long knock.

“Agent Pfeiffer,” Tanya opens the door before his knuckles have more than tapped the wood. “I was starting to think you wouldn’t come.”

“So was I,” Dan admits, stepping into a landing that leads down a set of dark stairs.

“Sorry.” Tanya holds up a flashlight. “The light went out a few weeks ago and we’ve been meaning to fix it, but, our petty cash box is a little low at the moment.” She drops her voice conspiratorially. “I think Lovett’s been dipping into it to buy that new MAD Magazine? Stupid humor if you ask me, but, it is his money- Watch your step.”

Dan steps over a loose board. “Might wanna put that on your list, too.”

“Oh, it has been for years. But, we barely break even on a good day. Bars like ours don’t exactly attract a lot of investment, and Lovett refuses to charge a cover. ‘What’s a possibility of a head wound compared to the guarantee of a safe space for even the least privileged among us,’ he always says.” She cocks her hip and drops her chin when she does her Lovett impression, pitching her voice high and just the edge of condescending. Dan recognizes it immediately.

“A safe space for what?” Dan asks.

Tanya reaches the end of the stairs and pulls open a pair of thick, velvet curtains. “For this.”

Dan steps forward … and freezes.

He’s heard of places like this, seen pictures from the increasing number that the FBI has raided, but he’s never dared step foot in one. He can feel the electricity from the entryway, a low thrum of excited chatter, a thrill of freedom, and an undercurrent of danger. Half the eyes turn to him as he enters because, even though they’re invite-only and basement bars offer the highest level of security a man with Dan’s proclivities can ask for, they aren’t foolproof and any stranger brings with it increased risk. 

Dan can’t really blame Lovett, then, for the way he scowls as Tanya pulls Dan by the elbow over to the bar.

“You invited a fucking member of the FBI?” Lovett hisses, digging his rag so harshly into the glass he’s cleaning that it shatters between his fingers.

Tanya rolls her eyes and hoists herself onto a stool. Under the bright colored lights, Dan takes in the suit she’s wearing, perfectly tailored around her hips, and possibly nothing under the clasp of her jacket. “No need to get violent about it.”

Lovett sighs, dropping the rag, glass and all, into a trash can. He sticks his injured index finger into his mouth. “What is the first rule of Swamp Club?” He asks, muffled around his finger.

“Keep it secret, keep it safe,” she recites, by rote. “Permission to present counter evidence?”

Lovett reaches for a glass with his left hand and starts awkwardly pouring whiskey around two large ice cubes. “The floor is yours.”

“Exhibit one,” she starts, leaning her elbows against the bar. Her jacket bows around the golden skin between her breasts. “Agent Pfeiffer- Can I call you Dan? ‘Agent’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.”

Dan waves her on, “by all means.”

She winks at him and waves her hand as she continues. “Dan has had numerous occasions to turn you in, and he hasn’t.”

Lovett scoffs. “I’m innocent.”

“You know that and I know that, but he’s - for some reason I can’t even start to fathom - choosing to trust your sketchy ass.”

Dan feels his cheeks flush under the bar lights.

“Well, maybe I can start to fathom,” Tanya continues, flicking her eyes to him and visibly filing away the flush for later.

Dan’s throat is croaky as he tries to pull her off that line of questioning. “Exhibit two?”

“Right, exhibit two.” Tanya’s grin widens. “He’s had a full, what?, two conversations with you now and hasn’t run away.”

_Three_, Dan corrects in his head, as Lovett adds a sprig of thyme to the drink and mutters, “three,” into the glass. He pushes it across the bar for Dan, carefully making sure that their fingers don’t brush.

Tanya laughs, slapping her knee as she bends over. “Perfect, just, perfect.”

“Did you give her gin again? You know what gin does to her when she’s smoking.” Emily’s laugh is like crystals, clinking in the wind. She touches Tanya’s shoulder, crossing her ankles under her pink bell skirt and leaning against Tanya’s back for support.

“Hi babe.” Tanya turns to press her lips to Emily’s head, spinning the chair so Emily can settle between her knees. “You never met Dan, did you?”

“Not officially.” Emily holds out her hand. She has a strong handshake, her fingers soft and steady in his. “Pleasure.”

“All mine,” Dan assures her, trying not to let his eyes widen too far. 

He can’t look away from Tanya’s bright pink nails, complementing Emily’s skirt where they’re pressed together, or the way Emily’s leaning back on her elbows, perched against Tanya’s thighs like she belongs there. He must be obvious about it, because Emily frowns. “Are you sure he’s one of us, T? He looks awfully shell-shocked.”

“I was just getting to that,” Tanya grins. “Exhibit three, the pièce de résistance-”

Emily shakes her head. “You really need to stop trying to speak French. Your accent is embarrassing.”

Tanya pinches her waist. “Stop interrupting.” She looks up, her smile hovering as she catches Dan’s gaze and keeps it. “You are one of us, aren’t you Dan Pfeiffer?”

Dan’s hand shakes as he brings the glass to his mouth and downs it in one go. Lovett already has another waiting, three fingers of his best brandy. Dan downs those in one go, too. “You knew?”

Lovett shrugs. “I suspected, but, Tanya’s the real matchmaker, I’m just running a semi-reputable business.”

“Yes, yes, your aura is a fucking rainbow.” Tanya rolls her eyes and shies away as Emily digs her elbow into Tanya’s thigh. “You don’t need to be a soul medium to see the way Dan-” Lovett’s head snaps to her, his eyes dark and warning, flashing lightning in a way Dan’s never seen before. Tanya sighs, and finishes, lamely, with a motion towards Dan’s whole countenance, which he’d take offense to if he wasn’t reeling from the whiskey and the way Tanya’s thumb is drawing circles on Emily’s hip and they way she’s read him, after one meeting, better than any of his friends, colleagues, or relatives have in thirty-six years.

“Your gaydar is amazing, love,” Emily placates, turning to kiss Tanya’s cheek. “Good thing, too, because that medium stuff you’ve got going is a crock of shit.”

“Hey,” Lovett and Tanya say, together. Lovett continues, “superstitions about soul mediums keep our business afloat and food on your table.”

Emily sighs and leans closer to Dan, lowering her voice. “Don’t believe a word either of them say. Soul mediums can’t see soul bonds. They just get feelings and flashes of light that, fifty-fifty, mean you have to pass gas.”

Despite himself, Dan chuckles. “Those are bad odds.”

“Or good ones, depending. Glass half full, you know? Speaking of-” Emily pushes her empty glass towards Lovett. “Why am I empty?”

“Because you have two good hands that are more than capable of pouring your own damn glass,” Lovett sighs. He holds out the whiskey, though, and refills all three of their glasses before finishing off a gin for himself.

“You know,” Dan says, as he accepts his glass, “Jon’s going to be awfully disappointed.”

Emily throws her head back as she laughs, resting it on Tanya’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

Dan’s hand freezes halfway to his mouth. “Huh.”

Tanya sighs, “why are men all so stupid?,” and holds out her glass. “To new knowledge.”

“And new allies,” Emily nods, clinking their glasses together.

Lovett’s eyes flick to Dan’s before he raises his glass to join theirs.

***

"Sorry Tanya threw this on you." Lovett pulls himself onto the bar, crossing his ankles and letting his legs swing gently. "It's like she's trying to get us raided. Never had much of a survival instinct, that one."

It's just past midnight and the Swamp Club is starting to empty of it revelers and its energy. Dan feels off-kilter, the self that had shattered when Tanya raised her glass a few hours earlier feeling weak and vulnerable now that the Club is dispersing, taking his new center of gravity with it. Dan takes a careful sip of his drink. "You two make quite a pair."

Lovett reaches behind him for the bottle. "_I_ have a survival instinct."

"Do you?" Dan takes a sip. If Tanya destroyed the core he spent over thirty years building his life around with a few words, and if his replacement core was as ephemeral as gay DC's dancing stamina, then maybe whiskey can be his new thing. He takes another sip.

Lovett tilts the bottle back, swallowing around it. "I didn't invite _you_ here."

"Ouch."

Lovett shrugs. "It remains to be seen whether you turn us in or not. Everything I am is wrapped up in this place."

"That's right, I forgot. I'm risking my career and the reputation I've worked so hard to create, but, by all means, tell me how little I have at stake here."

Lovett rolls his shoulders and takes another swig, wiping his mouth with his wrist. Dan can just see the scar on his palm, and his own soul line beats in sympathy.

"I told you I inherited the Agency?" Lovett asks, his eyes flicking upwards. "From an aunt, twice removed on my mother's side. I thought it was a sick joke, leaving someone like me," he squeezes his fingers over his palm, "a damn soulmate agency."

Dan's heart beats in his ears and he pushes his glass away. "Just cause you can't _see_ your soul line, doesn't mean-"

"Where the fuck do you come from? The pot of gold on the other end of the rainbow to gay paradise?" Lovett rolls his eyes and leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "It's not my scar that's the problem."

Dan swallows and glances down at his palm. He's always wondered- "My parents never signed me up for an agency. I always thought it was their liberal ideas, giving me the choice, but, maybe-" He shakes his head and looks up again. "Maybe they knew, long before I did."

Lovett's hand twitches towards him, then stops. He squeezes the edge of the counter, hard enough for his knuckles to turn white. "Most kids aren't that lucky."

Dan spreads his hand flat on the bar. His fingers are shaking. "What happens to them?"

Lovett shrugs. He doesn't close the distance between their pinkies, but he doesn't pull back, either. "The wealthy ones pay for a heterosexual match. The less fortunate end up in foster care, or on the streets, or spending the rest of their lives ducking from that lavender mark."

"That's barely a life."

"Is it so different from yours?" Lovett asks, his voice soft and sure.

Dan's mind reels. He thinks about Iko, about how different his adolescence would have been if Iko hadn’t closed his mind and his palm the moment Dan touched him. He thinks about Sam, and how different his career might have been if Sam had chosen him, wanted him, if he had asked Dan to choose him over the Academy. And he thinks about what his career would have been like if he hadn’t been terrified every moment that one wrong step would bring Jack and his accusations and his threats to crash over his shoulders.

Dan's voice feels hoarse. "I chose mine."

Lovett spreads his fingers, twisting his pinky with Dan's. "I don't know that you did. If society was more understanding-"

Dan scoffs and Lovett pulls his hand away, curling them in his lap. Dan feels cold without his touch. "That's a pipe dream. I deal in realities."

Lovett lifts his chin, looking out over the dance floor where there are two couples still swaying to the music in their own heads. "Some nights, it doesn't feel like such a pipe dream."

Dan follows his gaze. He can just make out Tanya's head resting on Emily's shoulder, the shake of her back as Emily makes her laugh. That level of intimacy still feels impossibly far from him, but in that moment, Dan would have done anything to feel the warmth of Lovett's skin again. “Is that what happened to you? Did you parents try to buy you a soul match?”

“No.” Lovett shakes his head, cradling his open palm in his lap. “The burn was an accident, but the scar was not. We got to the hospital in time. The doctors could have fixed it, my family had the money, but-”

Dan twitches, wanting to reach out, to touch the scar and trace the edges of the soul line that do remain.

“My dad asked them not to.” Lovett takes a deep breath. “He knew, he always knew.”

Dan’s breath catches. “That’s awful.”

Lovett shakes his head, reaching for his drink and hiding the scar in the glass. “It was much kinder than what most fathers would have done. My father gave me an out.” Lovett raises his glass, tipping it back until his lips are wet with ice and gin. “It’s not his fault that I didn’t take it.”

Dan swallows around Lovett’s bravery. He clears his throat. "You didn't finish the story of this place."

“Right.” Lovett grins, his dimples sinking into his cheeks. "So, my great aunt leaves me this place in her will. I'm about two days from burning it to the ground so I can take the insurance money all the way to California-"

Dan groans. "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that."

"Whatever you need to tell yourself," Lovett waves him away. "Anyway, it didn't happen. She left me a note in her office, just said 'I thought you could use this place's hidden treasures.' Turns out she hid Jewish immigrants in the basement during the War. I wish I could say I didn't know how she knew I'd need it, but, look at me," he motions down his body, "it was obvious."

"Your aunt sounds like a wonderful woman."

"Oh, she was a mean old bat," Lovett laughs. "Stole silver every time she came for the holidays. My mother _hated_ her."

Dan chuckles. "I see the resemblance."

"Fuck off." Lovett grins down at him, finally starting to rock his ankles again. "So, now I only run the Agency to fund the Club, funneling money from homophobic rich assholes into the city's safest space for gay and lesbian people."

"Schadenfreude."

Lovett raises an eyebrow, his grin widening. "Why, Agent Pfeiffer, you surprise me."

Dan shakes his head. "Dan."

Lovett laughs, straightening his back and jumping down from the bar. "We'll see about that. If you come back without half the FBI behind you, you might have earned it."

"Well, Mr. Lovett," Dan slides off his stool, pulling on his coat and holding out his hand, just to feel Lovett's one more time. "This was a thoroughly devastating evening, but, thank you for having me."

Lovett's grin spreads all the way to his eyes. "Devastating is my brand."

Dan snorts and reaches for his hat. "Til next time."

As he steps out into the humid early morning air, he can't shake the thought - dangerous and reckless and more than he's ready for - that Lovett's smile might just be a good replacement for the rocky foundations he's been building his shaky world on for the past three decades.

***

“Mr. Switzler, I presume?” Jack O’Malley holds out his hand. “Your reputation precedes you.”

O’Malley’s handshake is weaker than Dan expected it to be. He counts to three, then drops it. “Only good things, I hope?”

“If they’re true,” O’Malley laughs, “you’re like a leprechaun on the other side of the damn Mississippi.”

Dan matches his laugh, tipping it brighter and easier than is natural for him. “Good vintners hard to come by?”

“The hardest,” O’Malley nods. “Wine in this town is worse than piss.”

“If you’re pissing red, you might wanna see a doctor.” Jon holds out his hand. “Jake Fouls, business partner.”

O’Malley laughs again, taking Jon’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Jake Fouls, business partner. Come, Alroy said you’d bring wine. Let’s test it out.”

O’Malley has the best table in the house set with four big wine glasses and a white table cloth that he must’ve pulled out of deep storage, or bleached clean the morning before. The table’s directly in front of the kitchen and Dan watches the chef as Jon opens his briefcase and pulls out their first show bottle.

"Our best Pinot noir." Jon holds it out, cradled in his palm at an angle that catches the light, just like Priyanka showed them how to. "Full bodied, notes of raspberry and red currants mixed with an earthy quality. Tastes silky smooth on the tongue, though, as you'll see."

Dan barely holds back his laughter as Jon recites his lines with the vigor of a true connoisseur. He pours the first glass, finishing with a twist of his wrist that just barely keeps a drop from dribbling down the rim.

"See the tannins?" Jon swirls the glass and passes it around.

It's good - it had better be fucking good, the FBI paid a fortune for the four test bottles in Jon's briefcase - and Dan sets his napkin down as O'Malley and Alroy extoll its virtues. "If you'll excuse me, gentlemen, I must use the washroom. Down-" Dan stops himself, just before he gives away their recon, and waves to the left of the kitchen. "Over there?"

"Downstairs." O'Malley swirls his glass. "Hurry back, or we may just finish this bottle without you."

"I'll do my best." Dan folds his napkin carefully and drops it on his chair as he walks quickly to the stairs, making sure to take a moment to walk in the wrong direction to sell their cover.

He jogs down the steps, repeating his mission briefing in his head in an attempt to crowd out the thoughts that have been on tumble since Tuesday. _The wine cellar is to the left at the bottom of the stairs_ chasing the ghost of Lovett's hand against him. _Behind the oldest vintage, you'll know them by the cobwebs_ sweeping past the image of Emily’s hips framed by Tanya's knees.

"You shouldn't be in here."

Dan jumps, his hand brushing across the bottle of 1888 Cabernet he'd been inspecting as he straightens up. People have snuck up on him only a handful of times over his decade with the Bureau, and they have always been trained agents. Dan forcefully slams the door on any stray thought about the Swamp Club and pastes an awed expression on his face as he turns.

"Apologies. Aaron Switzler, vintner," he holds out his hand and waits for the suspicious waiter to take it before continuing. "The door was cracked and I couldn't help myself, do excuse my curiosity. This is a very impressive bottle."

The waiter's expression smoothes. "Oh, you're with the boss?"

Dan nods. "Guilty."

The waiter shrugs and grabs the bottle he'd come for, flashing Dan the label. "Nothing as exciting as the '88 I'm afraid. I can show you back to your table if you'd like?"

"Thank you," Dan nods, following closely after him.

"Found him sizing up the competition," the waiter laughs, slapping Dan's shoulder when they get back to the table.

Jon fakes a cough so that he can raise a concerned eyebrow behind his hand.

Dan shakes his head subtly. "Just wanted to know what we were up against."

O'Malley laughs. "No need to beat around the bush. I'll show you anything you want, any time."

"Next week?" Dan suggests. "That'll give our lawyers enough time to draw up the paperwork."

Alroy whistles. "Californians sure do move quick."

Dan shrugs. "The sooner we get the business half out of the way, the quicker we can get to the fun half."

O'Malley lifts his glass. "Cheers to that."

***

Tanya’s grin is wide enough to light the sky on the Fourth when Dan knocks, three quick raps and a slow fourth in rapid succession. She’s wearing a dress tonight, a long black number that hugs her hips and accentuates her shoulders, and she ushers him in like he’s given her a second, even more secret code.

Perhaps, he supposes, he has.

“Lovett will be so happy to see you,” she says conspiratorially, the mood tripped by her giggle on _happy_.

Dan laughs and drops his head next to hers. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

Tanya shakes her head, “soul medium.”

“Crock of shit.”

Her laugh jingles through the dark hallway and stretches all the way into the belly of the club. Dan pauses, for just long enough to take in the thrill of energy rushing through him, all the stronger for being less unsure and less confused - although no less awed and no less afraid - this second time, then takes a full step forward.

“Oh honey, we’re home,” Tanya calls, bowing performatively and motioning towards Dan.

Lovett leans against the bar, a rag hanging between his fingers and a smirk on his lips. His biceps pull under his t-shirt and his jeans bunch around his thighs and hang loose at his knees. Dan has never wanted anyone more.

“Is the full calvary behind you?” Lovett asks, cocking his head to match the smirk.

Dan shakes his head. “No cavalry.” He takes a step forward. “Just me.”

Lovett raises an eyebrow, pulling his smirk halfway into a smile. “And what would you like, Dan?”

His name rolls of Lovett’s tongue and shivers up his spine. Dan holds out his hand. “I’d really like to dance.”


	4. PART IV

Dan goes to bed thinking about Lovett’s hand in his. He wakes up thinking about the curve of Lovett’s hip, the way he followed where Dan led on the dance floor, the way he threw his head back and laughed at Dan’s jokes. Dan spends his days thinking about how to make Lovett laugh like that again, how to make him smile that real smile, how to make him believe that Dan - despite his position and the circumstances of their first meeting - is worth it.

“Are you listening?”

Dan shakes his head and looks at Jon. There’s a piece of coleslaw at the side of his mouth, a reuben leaking between his fingers. The sun is shining off the greying bristles of his hair, and Dan has to blink away the image of Lovett, a french fry clutched in his gesticulating hand, the artificial light gleaming off his curls. Dan grabs his tuna melt and takes a bite. “No.”

Jon rolls his eyes. He takes another bite without wiping away the coleslaw. “Taylor Vietor, Tommy’s sister?”

“A suspect in our murder case.”

“Our?” Jon raises an eyebrow.

Dan tosses him a napkin. “The CIA’s, whatever. That Taylor?”

“Yeah.” Jon wipes at his mouth, then takes another large bite. “She invited us to the opening of her show at the Dupont Theater Gallery, remember?”

Dan grabs a chip off the edge of Jon’s plate. “We were at her parents’ place to accuse her brother of murder. That invitation was politeness and nothing more.”

Jon cleans his fingers on the napkin and pulls out a folded piece of cardboard, embossed with the Dupont logo. “This enough of an invitation?”

Dan takes another bite. He doesn’t pick up the invitation. “We’re off the case,” he reminds Jon.

“Supporting an old friend,” Jon suggests, airily, “nothing more, nothing less.”

“And if said friend’s brother happens to show up?”

“Well,” Jon shrugs, “I don’t control the schedules of classmates turned gang members turned murder suspects.”

“Of course not,” Dan agrees slowly. “How could you?”

“Exactly.” Jon nods. “So, you’ll come with me?”

Dan sighs. He’s been cutting it close at every corner the last few weeks, but the way Jon’s eyes are soft and wet and so hopeful- “I like a good art show every now and then.”

Jon grins and takes another bite. Thousand island dressing oozes down his fingers.

“But first,” Dan warns him, mentally giving himself the same pinch of reality, “we have to finish this undercover job.”

***

“Gun?”

Jon pats his hip, where his baggy, in-style suit pants billow out over his holster. “Check.”

“Wine?” Dan continues down his mental list.

Jon holds up his briefcase. “At great expense to the FBI, check.”

“It’ll be worth it, if we can take O’Malley off the streets,” Dan sighs.“The contract?”

Jon pulls the envelope out of the briefcase and reads from it slowly. “O’Malley’s Pub, blah blah blah, Napa Wineries, yada yada yada, exclusive contract for three bars and five restaurants, with the option for more next year. These are good terms, actually.”

“Thinking of quitting your day job?”

Jon shrugs. “Just saying it wouldn’t be a terrible idea.”

Dan reaches for his own handgun, slipping it into his lower back holster and spreading his jacket over it. “As long as Priyanka runs the place, I’m in.”

Jon snorts. “You’d miss the badge before you could unpack.”

“Maybe,” Dan shrugs, tapping the small dagger in his sock one last time before holding the door open for Jon. “I could find pleasure in the quiet life. Greet customers, work on my tan, finally write that crime novel.”

“I can see it now,” Jon chuckles, stepping out into the humid evening and leading the way to O’Malley’s. “Dan Pfeiffer, palest man on the west coast, best selling author, gentlest hands with a keg.”

Dan frowns. “I don’t think they make wine in kegs.”

“Barrels, whatever.”

“I’ll ask Pri,” Dan makes a note. “You’d be invited, anytime.”

“Sure,” Jon laughs. “I’ll be on the next flight out, let me just check with the Director.”

Dan shrugs. “You could quit, too.” He holds his hand out, in the motion of a marquee. “Napa Wineries, Two Recovering FBI Agents and a Woman who Actually Knows Something About Wine.”

Jon’s laughter rings through DC’s bustling streets. “We’ll surely attract a certain kind of clientele.”

“Something to work with, at least.”

“Sure.”

“I’ve had worse ideas,” Dan shrugs. Ahead of them, O’Malley’s meticulously-cleaned awning shines in the dusky light.

“You’ve had better ones.” Jon raises an eyebrow. He stops at the end of the block, his hand on Dan’s upper arm despite the red light. “You’re serious about this.”

Dan sighs, his heart pulsing around the mirage: Lovett, wiping curls off his forehead as he pours a flight of their most expensive pinot for a full bar, Emily and Tanya welcoming guests and offering snacks as they wait, all grinning at Jon and Dan as they struggle in with a heavy barrel, their sleeves rolled up and the sweat of good, bodily labor on their brows. 

Dan’s palm aches and he brushes his thumb across his soul line. It’s slightly warmer than the rest of his palm. “No, of course I’m not.”

Jon eyes him carefully, but, as the light turns red again, he steps off the curb. “I don’t know who you are anymore.”

“Neither do I,” Dan mutters under his breath. As he catches up with Jon, he adds, “for tonight, at least, I’m Aaron Switzler.”

Jon’s smile rises to meet the eyebrows Pri had filled in in wardrobe. “This is going to be fun.”

Dan wishes he could second the sentiment. He pulls the persona of Aaron Switzler around him like a cloak. Alroy meets them with a grin and Dan meets him with Switzler’s loose, friendly handshake. O’Malley’s already at the bar, his boisterous voice heard halfway down the restaurant, and Dan takes the cigar he’s offered immediately. Switzler likes the finer things in life, his tongue always stained red with wine and his fingers always smelling faintly of tobacco. So Dan drinks and he smokes and he tries not to let his Switzler character slide all the way into his own dreams.

Dan hasn’t been this distracted on a job, though, since the morning after Jack’s warning. He can see his mirage every way he turns. A dark head at the end of the bar looks exactly like Tanya, until she turns and catches Dan’s eye with an interested smirk. Long nails tap against the closest table, her fingers pale and soft and so much like Emily’s that Jon has to nudge him for staring. A blond head pushing through a group of waiting diners at the front looks achingly familiar, and curls - the fucking curls - every time Dan turns his head.

“I’ll have my lawyers take a closer look at this tomorrow morning,” O’Malley taps his blunt fingers against the dummy contract the FBI lawyers had drafted flawlessly, “but it all looks to be in order.”

Dan wrenches his eyes away from the front of the restaurant. The blond head doesn’t flicker out of view when Dan blinks. “It is, I assure you.”

“I’m sure it is.” O’Malley hands the folder to Alroy. “And when it is, we’ll have it signed and returned to you by noon.”

Dan nods. “My associate will leave you the name of our hotel.”

“Perfect.” O’Malley grins. “Now that the business is over, let’s commence with the fun part of our new partnership. The chef’s making oysters this evening in a wine sauce that’s to die for.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Dan watches the blond mirage slip around the bar and disappear down the stairs towards the restrooms. “Oysters sound lovely. I’ll admit, though, I’m not quite famished just yet. Perhaps a tour before dinner?”

Jon tries to catch his eye at the deviation from their scheduled plan, but Dan shakes his head subtly.

O’Malley throws his head back and laughs. “A man after my own heart, letting me show off before dinner.”

Dan forces himself to chuckle. “Selfish, I assure you. I know of a few vintages that are just divine with oysters, and if your wine cellar is as verbose as you claim-” He lets it hang there, a challenge he’s certain O’Malley won’t be able to leave.

“Oh, it is.” O’Malley stubs out his cigar. “If you’ll follow me, gentleman.”

Dan stubs out his own cigar and grabs his whiskey glass, sipping it calmly as they walk back down the stairs, to the wine cellar Dan had been almost caught in the week before. He’d been able to map out the room, though, and he repeats the plan to himself as they walk, pushing thoughts of Lovett and vineyards and his burning palm aside, replacing them with whiskey.

Dan watches O’Malley turn into the wine cellar as he takes the last step, and makes to follow, except-

“Don’t go in there.”A voice hisses and Dan catches the edge of blonde hair as it slips out of the shadows.

“Tommy.” Jon squeaks behind Dan, his glass slipping out of his hands.

Tommy catches it at the last moment and downs it in one go. “Fuck, are you sure you two work for the FBI?”

Dan glares. “Best agents the Bureau has.”

“Then the Bureau is in trouble.” Tommy hisses. “You’re walking into a trap.”

Jon’s voice is weak as he argues, “we’re undercover.”

“I know. O’Malley knows. You’re the fucking talk of the Blacks.”

Dan reaches up to touch the edges of his toupee. “Fuck.”

“You need to go. _Now_.”

“We’re so close,” Jon frowns. “We know where they keep the cocaine.”

“And the Blacks know you know.” Tommy sighs. “There’s a detonator waiting for you the moment you open the safe.”

“Fuck,” Dan repeats.

Footsteps echo down the hallway and Tommy swears, flattening himself against the wall. “What the fuck are you waiting for? An embossed invitation?”

“Tommy-” Jon swallows.

“Go,” Tommy levels both of them with a hard expression. “Before you get all three of us killed. Fucking _go_.”

Dan turns on his heel, grabbing for Jon’s elbow and pulling him up the stairs. 

Dan doesn’t stop. Not for their coats or for the suitcase of expensive wine or for the half-smoked cigars still smoking on the counter. Dan doesn’t stop until his lungs are screaming and Jon’s breath is ragged in his ear. He doesn’t stop until they’re two blocks from Jon’s apartment, the street lamps flickering and the air thick with humidity and tension.

Dan slows his aching feet and loosens his sore fingers from around Jon’s elbow. “Jon.”

Jon shakes his head, turning so quickly that Dan has to take a step back. “What the fuck was that back there?”

Dan shakes his head, his ears ringing. _I’m sorry_, he wants to say, _I was distracted, I missed the signs, I’m sorry I’m fucking everything up_. Instead, he clears his throat, “we walked into a trap.”

“Tommy-”

“Works for the Blacks,” Dan fills in the blank.

“Saved our lives,” Jon corrects.

Dan swallows. “Luckiest bastards in the District.”

Jon shakes his head, his voice cracking. “If he worked for the Blacks, he wouldn’t have saved us.”

Dan shrugs helplessly. “We do strange things for old friends.”

“I don’t buy that.”

Dan doesn’t either, but he can’t let Jon know that. He can’t risk what Jon might do, what he’s already been doing, what Dan knows Jon is aching for. “Don’t let your feelings blind you, Favreau.”

Jon opens his mouth and Dan steels himself for the accusation of hypocrite that Jon has every right to throw at him.

But Jon just shakes his head. “Tommy wouldn’t work for the Blacks.”

“You don’t know that,” Dan shrugs, laying all the evidence out in the pattern he was taught to see. “He knew we were going to be there. He knew it was a trap. He knew how they were planning on killing us.”

“I know.” Jon hangs his head. “I know all that, but-”

Dan watches him carefully, sympathetically, guilt rising in his throat.

Jon turns, frustration in every tight muscle. “I’ll see you in the morning, Agent Pfeiffer.”

Dan doesn’t let himself flinch until Jon’s back is turned. Then he sits on Jon’s stoop, resting his head against the wrought iron railing. He can feel Jon’s eyes on his back, three stories up, but he doesn’t turn and he doesn’t leave. If a little exhaustion is the exchange he has to make to keep Jon from doing something incredibly stupid, it’s an exchange he’ll make all day.

So he sits and he self-recriminates and he tries to piece the puzzle together as the sun slowly rises over the horizon.

***

Jon still isn’t talking to him three days later when Dan dons his best suit and the non-uniform salmon shirt he saves for special occasions. He debates about the cufflinks for a full thirty minutes and is still tugging at his cuffs another thirty minutes after that, when he climbs out of the metro. It’s a warm evening, but the women milling in front of the Dupont Theater Gallery are dressed in floor-length dresses in monochromatic colors and half the men are dressed in three-pieced suits.

Dan pulls his jacket sleeves lower and steps into the gallery. He takes a glass of champagne from the first tray he passes. It’s pink and bubbly and Dan wishes desperately for something stronger as he steps up to the first painting.

“She spent a few months in England,” an older woman is saying, her grey hair piled high on top of her head. Dan recognizes her - an NYU professor who’d helped the FBI out on a counterfeit case a couple of years ago - and steps closer to listen. “You can see the influences of Paolozzi and Hamilton. See, here-”

She points to a tootsie pop wrapper, blown up and enlarged. It’s held by a replica of what even Dan can recognize is a crude recreation of Michelangelo’s David, the tootsie pop angled at just the right at his hip to create modesty.

“A great statement against the Soviet’s anti-competitive practices,” the professor’s companion nods sagely.

“Perhaps.” The professor purses her lips. “Or perhaps it’s commenting on the dangers of consumerism and how quickly we’ve been adapting.”

“Come now,” her companion takes her elbow, “that would be un-American.”

“Of course,” the professor demures, allowing her companion to pull her across the gallery floor.

Dan looks at the picture for another long moment, then moves on to the next piece. It’s a wire sculpture and if he tips his head just right, downs his champagne just fast enough, it looks like Wile E. Coyote wearing a painted Spam tin as a hat.

Dan reaches for another glass of champagne and steps towards the next piece. It’s a picture of two hands, palms up, shaded with charcoal. The only color is the bright red, white, and blue of the soul lines, stretching across both hands like the new interstate highway President Eisenhower’s been threatening to green light.

Dan’s leaning forward to decipher the tiny GE, Ford, and Studebaker logos dotting the palms when someone steps up next to him.

“This is my favorite piece,” Taylor says. Her hands are in the pockets of her high-waisted pants, pin-striped to match the black-tie theme. She’s the only woman in the room dressed in pants. “No one else has given it a second glance.”

“I like it,” Dan smiles at her as he tries to remember what he overhead from the professor. “I just can’t figure out if it’s a commentary for or against capitalist consumerism.”

Her laughter fills his senses. “Neither, both, whatever you want it to be, that’s the beauty of expressionism. It means something different to each of us.”

Dan nods. Ambiguity has never really been his thing. “And what does it mean to you?”

“The artist is dead, remember?” Her smiles softens. “But, just between you and me?” She holds up her palm, showing him the full length of her soul line. She traces it and Dan sees it light up, pale against her even paler skin.

Dan’s skin goosebumps. It’s not that her line means anything to him, but unconsummated soul lines are private. Dan can count the number of full, lit up soul lines he’s seen in the last three decades.

She traces her palm again and looks up at the drawing. “It’s about connection, real, true, connection between two people.”

She takes great means to talk around pronouns and Dan looks back at the painting. Now that he’s seen Taylor’s palm, he recognizes the one on the left. The one on the right- Dan’s absolutely certain it’s the slim fingers and soft skin of another woman.

He swallows and looks at her. “Taylor-”

She smiles sadly at him. “I wasn’t sure you’d show tonight.”

Dan doesn’t look away from her. “I promised Jon I would. Have you seen him?”

Taylor shakes her head. Her blonde hair is in the same long, loose braid they’d seen at her house so many months ago now. “Not yet. I haven’t heard from him and I hoped, after sending the invitation to this opening-”

Dan swallows. He grips the stem of his glass and tips it back. “We were taken off your brother’s case.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry. We would have told you if we’d made any breakthroughs.”

Taylor nods. She pulls her hands out of her pockets. Her nails are painted a dull, flag red. “I figured. I just hoped-”

Dan’s chest twists. “I know.”

“Well.” Taylor gives him a half-smile. “I hope you enjoy the show, anyway. If you’ll excuse me, I have some magazine editors my agent would really like me to smooze.”

Dan reaches for two more glasses of champagne and shoves one into Taylor’s hand. “Booze always helps.”

She laughs. “I think I’d like you, Agent Pfeiffer, under different circumstances.”

Dan sighs, watching her walk away from him. She holds her shoulders strong, her sleeveless blouse billowing behind her. Under different circumstances, he thinks, they might be very good friends indeed.

Dan takes a step back, past a sculpture made out of chicken wire and bourbon labels, and scans the room. The opening is in full swing, and Dan takes a sip of his champagne as he surveys the crowd, looking for a familiar figure. Jon might have spent the last few days disappearing from every room Dan has entered, but he’d never pass up the best opportunity they’ve had to see Vietor since they pulled Resnik’s body out of the Potomac. He has to be here, somewhere, next to the elegant woman on her fifth glass of champagne or the older gentleman checking the price tag on a wall-length painting of the contiguous United States or-

Dan catches a flash of greying hair and the glint of an FBI badge just as Jon ducks out a side door. Dan slides his mostly-full glass onto the closest tray and follows down a darkened corridor. He’s heading to the kitchen, nodding at the wait staff passing with trays full of bruschetta and shrimp hors d'oeuvres, when he hears two voices.

“What, were you just going to say a quick ‘hi’ to Taylor and leave?” Jon’s, low and shaking with anger.

“No,” the second, steady and calm, “Taylor can’t know I was here. I shouldn’t be. Fuck, this was stupid.”

Dan crouches against the wall, leaning forward so he can see around the doorframe. He can just make out the increasingly-familiar wisps of Tommy’s pale hair and paler face in the low lamp light filtering into the alley from the street. Dan swears to himself and flattens against the wall.

“But you are here,” Jon crosses his arms across his chest and shakes his head. “And you’re no better at skulking in shadows than you were at Quantico. You fucking wanted me to see you.”

“I really didn’t,” Tommy promises.

Jon spreads his hands. “Then what are you _doing here_?”

Tommy shrugs and looks away. He’s wearing a pair of expensive Italian loafers and perfectly-pressed slacks. There’s a Blacks tattoo on the inside of his left wrist, just under his soul line. “I’ve never missed any of Taylor’s shows, I didn’t want to start now. I thought- fuck, I should have known. You have no fucking survival instincts, Favreau.”

“That’s not news,” Jon shrugs. His voice drops, but it still carries across the still air. “I’ve been trying to find you.”

“I know.” Tommy’s head snaps up and, for the first time, Dan can see a flash of emotion in them. “I fucking know, Jon, and you have to stop.”

“I haven’t seen you in five years,” Jon blazes back, “I’m not going to let you go again without speaking to me.”

“Jon-”

“Last time I saw you,” Jon takes a step forward, “we had our entire lives in front of us. _Our lives_, plural, Tommy.”

“The last time I saw you-” Tommy shakes his head. His cheeks are pink, his neck is pink, what Dan can see of his forearms is pink- “I shot you.”

Subconsciously, Jon reaches up to knead at his shoulder, where the wound is no more than a light sliver of scars now. “You knew it was me?”

“Of course I did,” Tommy says, and his voice is hard and accusatory, but his mouth twists and his eyes soften. They’re the coolest shade of blue, but Jon’s looking anywhere but at him, his shoulders curled inwards protectively against the sharp edges of Tommy’s words. “You have to stay away from me. You can’t be at bars owned by the Blacks. You can’t ask my neighbors questions. You can’t cower in the fucking bushes outside my place of business. Let. Me. Go.”

Jon’s hands loosen like he wants to reach out, then tighten on his own hips. “You don’t need to worry about me,” he says, his voice hollow. The street lamp flickers. “I won’t bother you anymore.”

“Good.” Tommy pauses, just a tiny moment of a thing, and Dan catches the way Tommy squeezes his palm, his dull nails digging into his soul line, before he turns and flees.

Jon makes a choked sound, turning his chin away from the street light and the place where Tommy was just standing.

He doesn’t look up when Dan takes his elbow.

He doesn’t pull away when Dan leads him out into the street.

He doesn’t argue when Dan pushes him into a taxi.

He doesn’t say anything at all.

***

Dan’s apartment is quiet as he carefully measures out three whiskey shots for each glass. He can feel Jon’s eyes on his back as he pours.

Dan adds two large, square ice cubes and swirls the glasses for longer than strictly necessary, giving them both time to gather their thoughts, before taking a deep breath and turning about. “Here, this should help.”

Jon takes his glass, flinching away when their fingers meet. “How much did you hear?”

Dan sits on the edge of the armchair, a good body length and a half between them. “Enough.”

“Fuck.” Jon takes a sip and grimaces. He throws his head back and downs the rest of it.

Dan wordlessly slides his glass across the coffee table. Jon takes it, swirling the ice and staring into the golden depths.

“I’ve been following Tommy.”

Dan twists his fingers together and shoves his hands between his crossed knees. “I know.”

Jon’s head snaps up. His cheeks are ruddy, his stubble a day old and pocked red. “You never said.”

Dan shrugs. “I followed you, after the poker game.”

“Fuck.” Jon takes a long sip.

Dan uncrosses his legs and slides out of his chair. He brings the whiskey bottle back to the table with him. He fills Jon’s glass halfway, then brings the bottle to his own lips. “I think it’s time you were truthful with me, Jon.”

“I am,” Jon exclaims, too quick and too loud. His eyes are dark and wounded over the rim of his glass. “I thought I was. I don’t- Fuck, Dan, I don’t know what way is fucking up anymore.”

Dan points to the ceiling.

Jon gives him a withering glare, but at least his eyelids aren’t quite as red anymore. “Fuck off.”

Dan smirks and takes another swig from the bottle. “Not really who I want to fuck off with, but, if it’s on offer.”

Jon’s eyes widen.

Dan leans forward, his elbows on his knees, so he can fill Jon’s glass again. “Start at the beginning. Who is Tommy Vietor?”

Jon swallows. His throat is long and tan and if Dan wasn’t so sure that they’re both so in love they can’t see straight, he’d think about taking Jon to his bedroom, about closing the door, about keeping the lights off, about making absolutely sure that Jon knows how fucking beautiful he is, about whispering it into his skin and hoping, for just one night at least, that Jon could find himself in Dan’s body.

But Dan is, and Dan can’t, and, if he’s right, Jon can’t either. So he nods, encouragingly. “All cards on the table.”

Jon nods. “Everything I told you is true. We were at Quantico together. He was my roommate, my best friend, my- I still remember the first time I saw him. It was so sunny - you know those perfect Virginia August mornings? - and I couldn’t see where the sun ended and he began and I thought-”

Jon reaches out and Dan relinquishes the bottle.

Jon takes a swig and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “For that one, ridiculous moment, my world stopped. And when it started again, he was the sun I orbited around. Fuck, I was such an idiot.”

Dan slides onto the couch next to him, careful that their knees don’t knock. “Jon, did you and he ever-?”

“Yeah.” Jon takes another long swig. “It started a few months in, after football practice. It was such an innocuous day, nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary, except, when he looked at me, I thought, maybe- just, maybe, you know?”

Dan swallows. He reaches for Jon’s discarded glass, looking down at the rounded edges of the ice cube as it melts the sharpness away. “I know.”

Jon takes a deep breath. “Do you think it’s possible to be in love with someone who isn’t your soulmate?”

The image of Lovett’s scarred soul line flashes across Dan’s mind. He ducks his head to catch Jon’s eyes. “Did you ever check his palm?”

“Never had to.” Jon shakes his head. “I knew, I always knew. He wasn’t in love with me.”

Jon’s shoulder moves rhythmically and Dan looks down to see him rubbing his thumb over his soul line.

“You know what the stupidest part is? I spent years - fucking _years_, Dan - trying to fuck Tommy out of my mind with every woman I met. If I threw myself in, feet first, I was bound to find her at some point, right? She had to be out there, with perfect blue eyes and blinding blonde hair and a palm that matches mine. I just had to find her, and then I wouldn’t think about Tommy anymore. And I was _so close_. I hadn’t been consumed by thoughts of him in _years_.”

“Until we found Resnik in that river,” Dan fills in.

Jon nods. “Until he found his soulmate, fuck, and I- I’m not over him, Dan. I’m still so fucking in love, and how stupid is that?”

“Not all that stupid,” Dan promises. Jon snorts, lifting the bottle to his lips. Dan chuckles helplessly. “Well, a little stupid.”

Jon snorts again. “Pretty fucking stupid.”

Dan steals the bottle from Jon’s hands and ignores his yelp of protest. He nudges Jon’s knee.

Jon leans back against the couch. “Tommy’s a member of the Blacks, isn’t he?”

Dan remembers the softness of Tommy’s eyes, the way he said _of course I did_ like it was supposed to be followed with _I’d recognize you anywhere_. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

Jon reaches blindly for the bottle again. “What do we do now?”

“Now,” Dan hands over the bottle, “we get spectacularly drunk.”

***

Dan wipes his sweating palms on the thighs of his pants. This seemed like a better idea three nights ago, when he was half a bottle of whiskey in and Jon was looking at him, his eyes red and lost, like Dan might have some of the answers he’s been searching for.

Dan has answers but, watching Jon now, with his perfectly-pressed work suit and his strong shoulders and his confused frown, Dan’s not sure Jon’s asking the questions anymore.

“What are we doing here?” Jon asks, looking up at the Swamp Souls lettering on the front door. He frowns as he breathes deeply, like he’s trying to remind himself as much as he’s trying to convince Dan. “I gave this case up, I wasn’t lying to you.”

“We’re not here about the case.”

Jon looks up, his eyes narrowing. “I’m certainly not looking for a soul match at,” he glances at his watch, “nine pm. Fuck, it got late.”

Dan holds back his chuckle. He’d taken Jon out to dinner after work, plied him with enough drinks to ease the reigns he holds over his life but not enough to mar his agency, and only then had dumped them both into a cab. Dan crosses to the side door. “We’re not here for that, either.”

Jon follows him, his head tilting as Dan knocks. Three short, one long. “If you’re recruiting me for a cult, the answer on that is ‘no,’ too.”

“You haven’t even heard my pitch yet.”

“You’re right, my bad.” Jon holds up his hand. “Let’s hear it, convince me.”

The door handle creaks and Dan takes a deep breath, meaning “all I ask is that you keep an open mind” when he says it.

Jon opens his mouth, but stops when the door opens fully and reveals- “Emily?” He looks at Dan with an injured expression. “You said we’re not here for a match.”

Emily giggles, holding onto the door for support. She has a bright red drink in one hand and it matches her cherry nails. She’s wearing a tight white sundress and her hair looks like it was in a tight bun earlier in the evening, but it’s falling in loose strands around her face, now. She looks at Dan. “He doesn’t know yet?”

Jon frowns. “I’m right here.”

Emily places her hand on Jon’s chest, “you are, poor thing,” and pulls him inside by his tie.

Dan shakes his head, snorting as he closes and locks the door behind them as he answers her question. “Show, don’t tell. First thing you learn at the Academy.”

“I can’t see a fucking thing,” Jon whines, his footsteps uneven as he gingerly searches for stairs in the dark, “and you’re certainly not telling me anything.”

Emily giggles again as she pushes open the bottom door and practically trips over Tanya, who’s waiting for them with a smirk and a full glass. She hands the glass to Jon. “I thought you might need this.”

Jon takes it, frowning deeply. “I still don’t know why.”

Emily wraps her fingers around Tanya’s elbow, leaning up for a chaste kiss. “Nothing for me, babe?”

“You don’t need anymore,” Tanya sighs, nodding at the drink still dangling from Emily’s fingers, and watches Jon carefully even as she grants Emily her kiss. “You didn’t prepare the poor boy?”

“Nope.” Emily curls her mouth to pop the ‘p.’ “But he’s smart, he’s getting it, aren’t you, Favreau?”

“If we’re doing this,” Jon swallows, “and I still don’t really know what _this_ is, I think you should call me Jon.”

“Jon.” Emily hands her drink to Tanya and holds out her free hand. “I’m Emily Black and this is my partner, Tanya, and this,” she nods at the bar all around them, “is the Swamp Club.”

“The Swamp Club?” Jon’s mouth is slow around the words.

“Oh, perfect.” Lovett says from behind them. He has a dish towel shoved into his back pocket and his sleeves are rolled far enough past his wrists for him to clean glasses. There’s tension in his voice, but it has nothing on the way Dan’s heart flips at hearing hi voice. “Now there’s two FBI agents in my very secret gay club.”

Dan smiles softly at him, his fingers already itching to pull Lovett back into his arms, to feel the warmth of his scarred palm and the swell of his hip and the knots in his shoulders, like he was built just to dance with Dan. “Nice to see you, too.”

Lovett flushes, the tips of his cheeks and the hollow of his dimples going pink, and Dan’s heart does another backflip. “It might have been, except you left the door open and some riff raff got in.”

Jon looks from Dan to Lovett and back again. His eyes are so wide, Dan can see the veins under his eyelids. “Dan?”

Tanya taps Jon’s wrist. “You might wanna drink up, sweetie.”

Jon doesn’t need to be asked twice.

Lovett sighs, “at least he fits in,” and leads them back to the bar. He reaches for the whiskey Dan likes and re-fills Jon’s glass. “I assume you like this leather stripping shit too?”

Jon downs the second glass, coughing into his elbow. His voice is reedy. “I’m not picky.”

Lovett waggles his eyebrows. “Don’t say that too loud around here, you never know what you might attract.”

Jon drops his glass heavily to the bar. His hands are shaking and his movements are slow, like he’s wading through quicksand. This is it, Dan thinks, as he holds his breath. Lovett freezes, his fingers pale where they’re clutched around the neck of the bottle. Tanya’s hand stills on Emily’s waist, her knee bent against the bar. 

Finally, Jon takes a deep breath and smiles the brightest gap-toothed grin.“Who says I don’t want to attract it?”

Emily laughs delightedly, reaching out her hand. “I’m a great wing woman.”

Jon takes it, laughing a little breathlessly. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Emily grins, pulling him towards a table full of eligible young men. Tanya leans the rest of her weight against the bar, shaking her head as she watches them go. Lovett reaches for another glass and fills it. Dan only starts to breathe again when Lovett brushes their fingers together.

***

“Still mad at me for letting the riff raff in?” Dan leans against the bar. His drink is half empty and the club is more so. Emily’s still laughing on the main dias, her legs thrown over Tanya’s knees while Jon watches them like they’re the missing puzzle piece his life’s always been missing. In the other corner, a game of billiards is wrapping up and, at the door, a young woman is helping her girlfriend into her traveling coat. The rest of the Swamp Club, though, has wrapped up for the week.

“I’d prefer he wasn’t in law enforcement.” Lovett drops his dish towel to the counter. “But, no, he needed us. You did the right thing.”

“Gracious of you.”

“How you found such an attractive partner,” Lovett grins, “who’s even more lost than you were, though, is beyond me.”

Dan’s chest twists and he crosses, slowly, to the business side of the bar. He rests his hip next to Lovett and raises his glass to his lips. “An attractive partner?”

Lovett rolls his eyes and starts piling dirty glasses into the sink. “Fishing for compliments is _not_ attractive.”

Dan laughs, reaching around Lovett to add his glass to the pile. Lovett’s entire body shivers. “You’re giving me mixed signals here.”

Lovett drops his eyes, slowly, from the top of Dan’s short hair to the tips of his practical brown leather dress shoes.

Dan smirks, dropping his mouth to the shell of Lovett’s ear. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

“Dan.” Lovett grasps at Dan’s hip to steady himself. Dan can feel the heat in Lovett’s palm and the trembling in his fingers through his own dress shirt.

“You’re so distracting.” Dan lets his voice drop as he takes half a step back, just far enough that Lovett can see how serious he is. “I almost lost a case. I almost- I put Jon in danger, because I can’t get you out of my damn head.”

Lovett swallows. His hand tightens on Dan’s hip. “That’s not quite the effect I was going for.”

“I don’t know what to do anymore.” Dan shakes his head. “I don’t know what’s up and what’s down. I don’t know if I’m coming or going or where I even want to go. All I know is that you’re at the center.”

Lovett is so rarely still, but, for what may be a moment or may be the rest of Dan’s life, he is. Dan takes the time to take him in, read his history in the wrinkles in his forehead and the loose curls around his ears, feel his fears in every ridge of his fingertips and the tension in his wrists, predict his dreams in the sharp edges of his scar and the heat of the bits of his soul line that remain.

And then Dan can’t think at all, because Lovett is kissing him.

Lovett’s kissing him, and it’s everything Lovett is and was and wants to be. Dan can taste the answers to his unspoken questions in Lovett’s mouth, an answering promise in the brush of his tongue and a million questions of his own in the curl of his lip. Answers rise in Dan’s chest, the beating of his heart, the heat of his soul line. He meets Lovett halfway, his hands in Lovett’s hair and his teeth around Lovett’s lower lip and hot, staccato breath against Lovett’s ear.

The club disappears as Lovett’s tidal wave pulls him under. The clang of glasses, the click of the closing door, the wolf whistles coming from Jon and Tanya and Emily, it’s all nothing more than distant constellations. Lovett pulls him deeper and deeper and deeper, until he’s absolutely certain that he’s going to drown and just as certain that he’d do so gladly, as long as Lovett is drowning next to him.

Lovett tilts back on his heels. “I have a bedroom. Upstairs.”

It’s not quite a lifeline, but Dan takes Lovett’s hand and lets himself be pulled out from behind the bar.

“You know how to close up,” Lovett calls, waving his free hand without giving their friends the benefit of his flushed face.

Jon whistles, both fingers between his lips, and Dan does risk a glance at him. When Jack had wrapped his fingers around Dan’s neck and pulled him into a trap of his own making, Dan had closed this door behind him. The FBI was, and would always be, at odds with his body’s desires. Dan had told himself that he was fine with that. His job, he’d promised himself, was all he’d ever need. With Jon smiling warmly at him and Lovett’s hand licking flames up Dan’s arm, Dan can barely remember the cold comfort of that promise.

He turns away, but not before Jon can see every secret written across his face. Then Lovett squeezes his hand, and Dan can’t bring himself to care anymore.

***

Lovett’s apartment is three floors above the Club and a floor above the Soul Agency. In the moment Dan has to look before Lovett pushes him up against the door, he takes in the disorderly stacks of books and the wallpaper of newspaper articles and the meticulously-cleaned sink. Pundit meets them in the front hall, her nose cold and wet as she presses it between their knees.

Lovett laughs into Dan’s mouth, reaching down to pet the top of her head without pulling away. “You remember Dan?”

Pundit sits on their feet, her head cocked.

Lovett presses his forehead to Dan’s. “She’s not used to other people in the house.”

Dan’s chest blazes and he drops his chin to catch Lovett’s lips again.

“That doesn’t mean I’ve been celibate,” Lovett corrects quickly, his words hot and rushed between kisses. “But bringing them home-”

“The last man I fucked was in a park bathroom,” Dan admits, grasping Lovett’s hips and walking him backwards. “Bedroom’s this way?”

“Sounds unsanitary,” Lovett quips, his brow furrowing. He waves his hand behind him. “Follow the yellow brick road.”

There’s a line of sneakers and dress shoes in an array of colors, discarded one at a time in varying patterns down the hallway. Dan laughs as he follows them like breadcrumbs. “I thought about you the whole time.”

Lovett snorts. “Flattering.”

Dan drops his hand between their bodies, cupping Lovett between his legs. The sound he makes shoots through Dan’s mouth, down his spine, and twitches through his own dick. “Seems to be working just fine.”

“I’m a deviant, hadn’t you heard?”

Dan pulls back, watching Lovett’s mouth try to follow his. Lovett’s lips are swollen and damp, the same shade of red as his cheeks, and Dan can’t help ducking down to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “My kind of deviant.”

Lovett chokes. His breath brushes across Dan’s ear, smelling of gin and cheap beer. Dan turns his head to kiss him, overcome by just the touch of Lovett’s lips. He’s the kindred spirit Dan had found in Iko, the rush of teenage lust he’d felt for Sam, the unity of mind and body Dan had thought he’d found in Jack, and something - something strong and unique and thrumming with possibility - entirely Lovett, all rolled into one. He’s intoxicating.

Dan backs Lovett into his own bedroom, careful to step them both over the last pair of mustard shoes at the threshold. It’s even messier in here. All Dan can see is a wrought iron bed frame that Lovett uses as a coat rack and a dresser that Lovett uses as a laundry hamper. Pundit’s bed is in the corner, surrounded by bones and small blue toys, and Dan offers her a sad, “sorry, girl,” before he closes the door with her on the other side.

“I’m going to pay for that,” Lovett sighs, stepping back and into his room as Pundit gives a mournful bark.

Dan follows him, reaching for the bunches of Lovett’s shirt and pulling it from his pants. “I’ll pay her back in the morning. How does she feel about bagels?”

For the third time that night, Lovett freezes. Dan can see the implications rolling down the trap doors and secret staircases of his mind, and Dan thinks, for a moment of blinding clarity, that he’d gladly spend the rest of his life clearing out the cobwebs and learning the codes that Lovett keeps so carefully locked away.

“She loves them,” Lovett finally says, raising his arms and letting Dan pull his shirt and undershirt over his head in one go. He reaches behind him to flip on the bedside lamp. A test, a challenge. “Preferably with lox.”

Dan steps forward, the shadow of his body throwing Lovett’s into streaks of hard, pale muscle and divots of soft skin. Dan fits one hand into the perfect swell of Lovett’s left hip, just below the lines of his rib cage, and the other across Lovett’s bicep, his thumb tweaking the dusky circle of Lovett’s nipple. “I can do lox,” Dan promises.

“I don’t like the crappy salted shit,” Lovett warns, as Dan walks him backwards towards the bed. “The good stuff is hard to find.”

“I have connections,” Dan murmurs, dropping his mouth to Lovett’s collarbone.

Lovett snorts. His knees hit the edge of the mattress and he topples backwards, pulling Dan with him. “The FBI has a folder on the best Jewish delis in the District?”

Dan’s knees fit around Lovett’s hips and he has to move a hand to catch himself above Lovett’s shoulder. “You’d be surprised what the FBI has files on.”

“I really wouldn’t.” Lovett’s eyes harden and Dan’s heart aches as he presses up, his chest to Lovett’s as he strains his neck for a deep, desperate kiss that he hopes relays everything he doesn’t yet have the words for.

Lovett whines and Dan feels it rumble through Lovett’s throat. He pulls back, leaving Lovett’s swollen lips reluctantly to kiss his dimples, the long line of his neck, the rope of muscle in his shoulders. 

“You’re amazing,” he whispers into the skin stretched tight over Lovett’s breast plate.

He drops lower, murmuring, “you’re perfect,” into the soft, flushed skin around Lovett’s belly button.

“I want you,” he says, finally, before he can’t say anything more. He twists his tongue around Lovett, pulling him deep into his throat and memorizing every part of him: the shiver that starts at his calf and finishes in his left pinkie when Dan licks him just right; the tan line that starts and ends in the crest of Lovett’s thigh that Dan doesn’t want to think too much about; the high, strangled sound Lovett makes when Dan presses his thumb _just right_ into the vulnerable underside of his knee.

The deep, satisfying rumble Dan feels when Lovett’s fingers pull desperately at his ears and the bristles of his hair, gasping out “Dan, Dan, Dan,” like his name means anything, like it means _everything_.

Dan pulls off, kissing Lovett’s dick as it bobs against his stomach, red and wet and straining towards Dan’s mouth even as he rises to kiss him. “I want you,” he repeats, his mouth inches from Lovett’s, not meaning anything more than Lovett’s hands and Lovett’s mouth and the stream of expletives falling from Lovett’s mouth, except-

Except, Lovett spreads his knees, squeezes finger-sized bruises into Dan’s hips, whispers “please” in Dan’s ear, as if Dan wasn’t so deep he couldn’t see up, down, sideways if it weren’t for the light shining from Lovett’s eyes.

Dan’s hands shake as they trail down Lovett’s sides. “I’ve never-” He starts, because he hasn’t. Not with Sam, not with the handful of faceless men he’d met in baths over the last decade and a half, not with the equally-small handful of women he’d tried and failed to forge a soul connection with over that same time period.

Lovett blinks, his eyes dark enough to drag Dan under. “I want you,” Lovett throws Dan’s words back at him, letting them rumble through both their chests before he twists, reaching to snag a bottle of lotion from his bedside table. His body elongates, his skin stretching, creating new wrinkles and crevices and Dan wants to memorize them all, except Lovett’s pressing the bottle into Dan’s hands, Lovett’s spreading his knees, Lovett’s smiling at him like Dan holds all the answers, and Dan doesn’t have the capacity anymore.

Dan swallows, coating his fingers and coating them again before sliding one inside. Lovett is- Lovett is hot and tight and for one interminably long moment, Dan thinks even his index finger won’t fit, but then Lovett sighs - a soft, musky, pleased thing - and his body opens, pulling Dan in.

Dan lets Lovett lead him. He lets Lovett fill his senses, the smell of him, the sound of his voice as it rises and falls with praise, the softness of his thighs as they tremble around Dan’s arm, the heat of his body as it takes Dan in like he’s always belonged there. First one finger, then a second, then a third, then, “curl them, yeah, fuck, _Dan_, that’s perfect, scissor them, _more_.”

Then more is _more_ and Lovett’s curling forwards, “fuck” drawn out of his mouth and wrung out of his muscles, his entire body going tense and then slack as he begs “please” and “more” and “if you need time, tell me, but, I’m so ready, tell me you’re ready, _Dan_.”

Dan’s breath catches as Lovett pulls him up, arches into him so they’re pressed together, acres of sweaty, sticky skin pressed to acres of sweaty, sticky skin. “You’re sure?” Dan asks, because he’s not sure he can hold back, either. He turns his head, kissing whatever he can find. The shell of Lovett’s ear and the curve of his shoulder and the patch of sweaty curls at his temple. “Please,” he whispers, meaning it as a question and hoping it’s an answer, hoping it’s enough of an answer, hoping it’s every answer Lovett’s been waiting for.

“Please,” Lovett repeats, his knees boxing Dan in, his feet flat on the mattress and his hips arching upwards, searching for Dan, wanting him, needing him.

Dan’s never been needed like this before. It’s overwhelming. The feel of Lovett’s hand wrapped around him as he pressed forward, the catch in Lovett’s breath as Dan breaches his body, the quickening of his heart beat to fall into line with Lovett’s. He lets Lovett set their rhythm, follows the press of his heel and the arch of his hips, the speed of his breath and the pace of his pulse. He doesn’t have to think about it, his movements are Lovett’s and Lovett’s are his.

When Lovett comes, he’s loud and messy, his body pulsing around Dan as he spills across Dan’s fingers and cries Dan’s name into his ear. He overwhelms Dan’s senses, sight, touch, sound, smell, and Dan drowns in it, let’s himself slide under, forgets who he is and who Lovett is and he doesn’t even realize he’s followed Lovett straight to the edge until he’s falling.

Afterwards, after long minutes of breathes that sound more like cries and feel more like promises, Dan rolls onto his back. He looks up at the ceiling, slatting his heartbeat in around Lovett’s and slowing his breathing to match. His knees are sore, his thighs are trembling, his heart aches with the aftershocks of an earthquake. Dan’s not sure they’ll ever stop. His world has shattered and reformed, the ground broken to make room for Lovett in every ravine, gully, and gorge. Dan’s chest feels as deep as the Grand Canyon, and as Lovett flows in to fill the empty spaces, Dan runs his hand up Lovett’s arm, kisses the top of his sweaty curls, breathes in his desperate laughter.

“I lied,” Lovett whispers, his voice cracked in the quiet of the room as he rolls into Dan’s chest and turns his hand, palm up, the scar scratching across Dan’s sensitive skin. “I’ve always wondered what it looked like.”

Dan reaches for Lovett’s hand, tracing the edges of the scar, fitting it in alongside the other memories of Lovett’s body he’s made tonight.

Lovett let’s him, then he curls his fingers, capturing Dan’s and turning his hand over. Dan’s soul line burns and as Lovett runs his index finger up the line of it, Dan’s breath catches. It shoots through him like a lightning bolt, his entire body trembling as heat settles between his legs. Lovett ducks his chin, following his finger with his lips and Dan shivers with the effort not to pull Lovett between his knees before he’s done.

When Lovett gets to the end, he tips his eyes up, murmurs, “I don’t have to wonder anymore.”

Dan shudders, feeling his chest scab over, with Lovett trapped inside. Dan reaches for him, pulls him up, his hands blind on Lovett’s sides and his thighs tight around Lovett’s hips. He crushes his mouth to Lovett’s and lets himself fall. 

***

Lovett doesn’t close his blinds.

Dan blinks into the dawning light, groaning as he rolls over and his body twinges. He hadn’t checked his watch when Lovett had collapsed on his chest for a second time, gasping for breath and warning “I’m two seconds from passing out,” but it couldn’t have been more than a few short hours ago.

Next to him, Lovett rolls over, his hand sliding under his pillow and his breath puffing against Dan’s shoulder. He looks peaceful in sleep, his forehead smooth of worry lines and his legs spread wide, like he trusts Dan, like he wants him, still. Dan presses a kiss to his forehead as he slips out of bed.

Pundit’s waiting for him on the other side of the door, her body curled against the crack and her eyes dark and accusing. “I’ll be right back,” he promises, petting her head as she stretches. She slides into the room behind him, jumping onto the bed and settling into his warm spot.

He shakes his head as he takes the steps two at a time, relishing the pull in his lower back, where Lovett had been just a few hours before.

There’s a bagel place two block downs, bustling with morning commuters. Dan asks for a taste of the lox, before ordering two bagels and two coffees and heading back out into the blinding light. The coffee is thick and pungent and Dan closes his eyes momentarily, letting his mind jump three steps ahead, to the lude twist of Lovett’s smile when he wakes and the way he’ll pull Dan in, taste the coffee and the lox in his mouth and demand things Dan’s prepared to give.

“Agent Pfeiffer?”

Dan blinks, opening his eyes to two agents. They’re dressed all in black and Dan can see the FBI badges glinting in their breast pockets.

“Agent Pfeiffer, please come with us.”


	5. PART V

The room is dark.

Dan knows the drill. Sparse room, low lights, hands cuffed behind his back, not tight enough to do any damage but tight enough that he can feel the stretch. No sound, except his own breathing and muffled footfalls outside, growing louder as they approach and softer as they pass, agents who could take another route to the bathroom but want to keep suspects on edge.

Dan is on edge. Dan is- Fuck, Dan is a suspect.

He tries not to count the minutes, the footfalls, the rhythmic catches in his own breath.

He tries not to feel the stress in his arms. He tries not to shift as the hard metal chair settles uncomfortably on his aching ass. He tries not to smell the sweat and the whiskey and Lovett’s cologne, pressed into every wrinkle in the clothes he’d peeled off Lovett’s floor just a couple short hours ago. He tries not to think about the Lovett he left, his pale skin illuminated by the rising sun, his arm stretched out into the warm, empty place Dan had left.

Sixty-seven minutes.

A hundred and fourteen footsteps.

His breath catches thirty-eight, no, thirty-nine times.

The door clicks and Dan blinks into the flash of light, his ears protesting the onslaught of sounds rushing in from the bullpen. Axe holds the door open, long enough to short out Dan’s senses, as he frowns at Dan’s arms, tied together with plastic strips. “Pfeiffer’s still one of ours. Someone, please, uncuff him.”

This is a tactic, too. Make him feel comfortable. Lull him into a false sense of security.

Right on cue, Axe smiles and sits across from Dan, crossing his legs like he’s done a thousand times in his own office, right before he’s praised Dan for his unparalleled service to his country. “Sorry about all the fuss. Some of the juniors are a little, ahh, overzealous, shall we say.”

“I’m familiar.” Dan smiles back, bland and temperate and pulled tightly over the roiling mix of anger and fear in his throat.

Jackson or Jakster or - Dan winces as the anonymous agent clips the side of his wrist with the scissors. If Dan hadn’t let himself become so complacent, this junior might have more loyalty to him and less schadenfreude at his downfall, but Jon’s always been so much warmer and gentler than Dan will ever be. It had seemed kinder, before, to leave the juniors to him.

“Thank you, Johnson,” Axe nods at him. “You can leave us now.”

Dan rubs his wrists, feeling the red, angry indents from the plastic. Lovett had held them loosely between his thumb and forefinger last night, his laughter like bells as he’d flipped their bodies, traced Dan’s touch points like they were his life lines as much as they are Dan’s.

“You’ve put me in an awful pickle,” Axe says. He reaches for the thick folder he’d brought with him and it thumps open on the metal table. “And I don’t like pickles.”

“Vinegar is an acquired taste,” Dan agrees. He mirrors Axe, crossing his right leg slowly over his left and folding his hands on the table.

“Funny, Pfeiffer. I always did like your sense of humor.” Axe pulls three photos out of the folder. “I’ll miss that the most, I think.”

“Not my sparkling intellect?” Dan raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t lean forward.

“That, I’m afraid,” Axe places the first picture to Dan’s left, “will be your downfall.”

Dan drops his eyes slowly to the black and white photo. It’s hard to make out, the shadows and the shipping containers blending into one, only the weak light of one lamp post shining off the Potomac to illuminate two men couched in the middle of a crime scene. Dan could recognize the back of his own thinning head and Jon’s gelled style anywhere, though.

Axe places a second slowly in the middle. He looks like it’s paining him as much as it’s paining Dan as he lifts his hand from it. Dan’s perfected that look, sympathy and empathy all rolled into one, carefully practiced grimace. Dan wonders who the bad cop is if Axe’s good cop fails.

Dan’s eyes flick quickly from the second to the third photo. They’re both as dark as the first, both taken from across the street from Swamp Souls. Neither is recriminating on its own. But even Dan can see the look on his own face - the heady mix of fear and anticipation he’d felt when he’d raised his hand and knocked on that door, so vibrantly red in Dan’s memory and such a dull grey in the photo - and put two and two together to equal nuclear espionage.

Last night, Dan’s world had shifted. He’d felt the rumblings under his feet, he’d heard the crumbling of the dry land, he’d seen the contortions as his body bent and bowed to fit Lovett into all the cracks, both new and old, that Dan’s been running from all these years. Looking at Axe, now, this rooms, feels like the aftershocks. Like the settling of the earth between his thighs, as hard and unforgiving as it’s always been. Like the inevitable conclusion to Dan’s decision to stop running, to stand and fight. Except, now, Dan can feel Lovett, a bright blaze of heat across his palm and beating in his chest. Now, Dan has something to cross the broken and cracked earth for. Now, Dan has something to lose.

“I only have a couple of questions,” Axe leans forward, tapping his fingers against the table to Mozart’s Sonata in C. Dan had memorized that song after his Quantico professors suggested it. Dan hated it then, he definitely hates it now, but he can’t keep his eyes and his ears from tracking it as Axe continues. “Before I hand you over to the CIA to do what they’ll do with you.”

The earth shakes and resettles under Dan’s feet and Dan curls his shoulders around those newly soft and vulnerable parts of his chest.

“Apologies, I misspoke. Before I hand both of you over to the CIA.”

_Fuck_. Dan digs his fingernails, hard, into the bright white heat of his soul line.

“I wouldn’t wish a CIA black site on anyone, not even my worst enemy. Which, as my first favorite agent turned Soviet spy, you’re treading awfully close to.” Axe’s fingers still. “Although, that depends a little on your answer to the first question. When were you recruited?”

Dan frowns, and he doesn’t have to force the confusion onto his brow. “By whom?”

“Did the Soviets come to you at the Academy? Was I so blind that I hired a Soviet spy?” Axe uncrosses his legs and leans forward, his chest pressing into the tops of his hands. “Or was it after? Were you recruited right under my nose?”

“I wasn’t recruited.” Dan forgets to keep his chest curled in his surprise as the ground rolls and settles again, with _Soviet fucking spy_ one one side and the Swamp Club on the other. “At all.”

Axe sighs. “This would really go better if you didn’t lie to me.”

Dan’s mind spins out, skidding through the dirt and drowning him in a storm of sand and dust. His eyes feel gritty, his ears sound stuffed, his brain feels sluggish and slow. 

Dan had been so very sure that he had known the stakes, that he’s always known them, so sure that he’s made every life decision to avoid them. But his reputation is sitting in the road, tarnished gold and five-pointed, six months back, and his future is already in a rubbish heap, smoking six months down a fork in the road where it had missed the turn off for San Francisco and had to double back. That leaves Dan, standing halfway between, looking up at a series of stakes as tall as Mount Everest rising in front of him.

The best he can possibly do now is to lower the stakes again, not to where he wants them to be, not low enough that Dan will ever be able to wake up next to Lovett’s curls on the pillow again. But if Dan shades his eyes, if he cranes his neck back just right, if he can find the ropes and the harness and the courage, he might be able to scale the mountain and set the stakes back to what they were - to his job and his pension and his reputation and not his freedom, to Lovett's livelihood and not his life - then they might just both survive this.

“The CIA has been tracking Soviet movement in the Blacks for years, now,” Axe continues. “I just never expected it to be you and a fucking soul matchmaker. How did you meet him?”

“Lovett?” Dan’s mouth twists around his name and he can’t quite keep the emotions out of his voice. “On the Resnik case, just as the file says.”

“That,” Axe says with the hint of a smile, “murder is going to be your greatest regret. It’s truly unfortunate that an innocent woman had to die for the CIA to make all the connections it needed, but it led us straight to Jonathan Ira Lovett. Or, well, you did. I suppose I should thank you for that. Ironically, the most patriotic,” Axe spits the ‘p’ and Dan flinches, “thing you’ve ever done.”

“I am a patriot,” Dan says, before he can stop himself. The wheels of his mind are still spinning in all directions as he searches for a way out of this. A way that doesn’t see them both forgotten, erased from the record books, left to waste away in a CIA black site as they slowly forget who they are, what they stand for, who they are to each other. Even if Axe makes good on his promise, Dan can’t let Lovett spend a single day with the Rosenbergs, waiting out his own electric chair. “I’ve been a loyal agent for over a decade and, if that meant anything to you, you’ll at least listen when I tell you that Lovett isn’t a Soviet spy.”

Axe reaches out to tap the photos. “These speak otherwise, but, if you have a way that two plus two plus two adds up to anything else but six, please, enlighten me.”

“Where six is fucking _crimes against the state_?” Dan asks, quickly, frantically, without thinking about it, and then freezes.

Fuck.

_Fuck._

Lovett will never speak to him. Lovett won’t so much as look at him, but, there is a way out of this. Dan would rather live in a world where Lovett is safe and free and hating the ground Dan walks on then a world that is as unbearably grey and bland as it would be without Lovett in it at all.

Dan uncrosses his legs and leans forward. “You’re right. Lovett did commit crimes against the state.”

The corner of Axe’s mouth twitches up.

“And so did I.” Dan’s palm burns, a white-hot flash of heat that sears the metal table under them. “But not in the way you think.”

Axe’s brow furrows and he leans forward to mirror Dan, his mouth opening with a question Dan can’t let him ask until he gets this all out.

“Swamp Souls isn’t hiding an espionage ring. It’s hiding a club for homosexuals.” Dan takes a deep breath and, on the exhale, everything he’s spent a lifetime hiding comes tumbling out with surprising ease. “I’m a homosexual.”

Axe’s eyes widen and Dan honestly doesn’t know if this admission is doing more or less damage than if he was selling state secrets to the Soviets.

“Lovett isn’t a Soviet spy,” Dan swallows, “he’s my soulmate.”

***

“Lovett,” Dan calls. He knocks, three times, hard, against the main door to Swamp Souls.

“Fuck,” he mutters, stepping back and shading his eyes against the blazing sun. It feels like a recrimination, the humidity beading against his skin in mocking drops as the rays beat a dangerous rhythm against his eyes. He wishes he’d grabbed his sunglasses on his way out of the FBI building. He wishes he had had more time. 

Dan squints through it all and lobs a small stone towards the second-story window.

The window creaks open, flecks of paint dropping onto the sidewalk at Dan’s feet. He has to close his eyes as Tanya sticks her head out, her dark hair reflecting the sun back at him and her dark eyes mirroring the sickening roll of emotions in his own chest.

Tanya picks the stone off the windowsill and tosses it back. It lands half an inch in front of him. “He doesn’t want to see you.”

Dan looks down at the dust on his shoes, then back up at her, hoping she can read his sincerity in the new wrinkles and grey hairs he’s developed in the last few hours. “I know, but it’s important.”

Tanya sighs and slides back inside. The window slams shut with a definitive thump.

Dan swears to himself as he picks up his pacing. Five steps past the red door that had once held so much promise, then five steps back. Five steps forward, towards the Pontiac convertible Dan had dreamed of driving out to California, one hand on the gearbox and the other on Lovett’s knee. Five steps backward, towards the impossibility of the raid, of FBI agents - good men, men Dan has worked with, sweat with, walked into fire with, men Dan had trusted with his body - tearing apart the sequined couches and smashing good bottles of whiskey and handcuffing the men and women Dan has trusted with his heart. Doing so gleefully, with ugly smiles on their faces and zeal in their hands.

Dan will never know if Axe let him go with the purpose of this warning, or whether he was too disgusted to keep Dan in his holding room any longer. “You may not be working with the Soviets yet,” Axe had said, waving his hand to create distance between them, “but men of your _proclivities_ are security risks. Get out of my sight.” But the FBI has been raiding bars ever since Secretary Peurifoy and Senator McCarthy warned of a “homosexual underground” that had seeped into every branch of government, and each time there’d been enough warning to mitigate the worst of the damage. When Sheltzer’s was raided last winter, the FBI found only a dozen or so _miscreants_ and a stock of the cheapest vodkas and gins. When the FBI had raided Cheryl’s Donuts the year before, they were greeted with two dozen women, their arms already held behind their backs in protest, no signs of _deviant_ activity for ten miles around the bakery-turned-nightly lesbian salon.

Whether by fortuitous circumstance or design, though, Dan does have the time. If only he wasn’t wasting it pacing in front of Swamp Souls instead of-

The door opens. Dan swivels, mid-pace, and trips over the curb as he rushes towards the three inches Tanya’s holding open.

“You look awful.” She frowns at the grease in Dan’s short hair, the angry red marks around his wrists, the smell of last night’s sweat coming off him in waves.

“Apologies for not taking the time for a shower between the detention center and here,” Dan growls, raising an eyebrow at her wrinkled blouse and loose braid as he pushes past her. “And you don’t look so hot yourself.”

“My boss called me at six thirty in the fucking morning,” Tanya growls, then pauses, her foot on the bottom step. “Detention center?”

Dan sighs, already taking the steps two at a time. “We really don’t have time to do this even once, none-the-less twice.”

He reaches the landing and, without waiting for Tanya to catch up, pushes into Lovett’s office. It’s even messier than it was last time, none of the old files gone but a host of new ones stacked precariously on the edges of the desk and filling the visitor’s chair. There’s a bulletin board leaning against Lovett’s desk, and he’s crouched in front of it, Pundit’s head resting on his thigh, as he pins a tracing of a soul line. He doesn’t look up. “Ahh, good, you’re back. Did you remember to get double lox? And did you find the Walsh file?”

“I knew I forgot something,” Dan chokes on the joke.

Lovett drops the tracing and the pin, swearing as it lands on his bare ankle. He has deep circles under his eyes and his hair is unbrushed and unwashed. “Look what the cat - dog? I never understood why only cats can drag things in - dragged in.”

“Cats have claws,” Dan shrugs. He scratches behind Pundit’s ear as she raises onto her hind legs, stretching against his thigh in greeting.

“So do dogs,” Lovett glowers, “if only she’d use them.”

Dan pushes Pundit down with a regretful pat on her side. “Tanya let me in.”

“I asked her not to do that.”

“‘Let’ is an exaggeration,” Tanya calls from the outer office, “he pushed his way in.”

Dan takes a deep breath. His chest feels thick, every regret for what he’s done and what he’s about to do swirling with every desire he has to reach for Lovett, to kiss him, to tell him every fucking thing he thought he’d have time for, spiraling into a black hole that threatens to pull him down. Dan will let it. Dan will go willingly. He has just one thing to do first. “You need to listen to me.”

“Funny,” Lovett looks back at the bulletin board, reaching for the end of another piece of string. His hands are shaking. “I had a few things to say this morning, before I woke up to an empty bed.”

“I went to get bagels.” Dan swallows. His soul line is so hot, it leaves a splotch of sweat on the thigh of his two-day-old suit pants. He laughs bitterly. “That place you like, at the corner? I even checked the damn lox for salt.”

Lovett’s back tightens. Dan can count the hard knots of muscle under his t-shirt.

“Only, I wasn’t the only one.”

Lovett rises onto his knees, turning his head just slightly. He looks even worse in profile, the curls around his ears matted and his biceps mottled with a rash, from heat and lack of sleep and Dan’s own stubble.

“The FBI knows about the Club.” Dan’s eyes slide closed. This can’t be the last memory he has. He can’t let this image of Lovett replace all the ones he has stored away. “You’re getting raided. Tonight.”

Lovett’s in front of him before Dan can count the beats. Dan’s eyes fly open and he has to reach out, catching himself against the doorframe before he can sink under the weight of Lovett’s expression, his mouth twisted in fury and his eyes beaming with Dan’s betrayal. Dan braces himself for the force of Lovett’s verbal assault, his knuckles white on the rotting wood and his knees balanced, but it doesn’t come.

Lovett sucks in his stomach, making himself as small as possible as he steps around Dan. “I knew, that first day,” Lovett says, his voice low and quiet, “that you’d be my downfall.”

Dan wraps an arm around his own chest, his hand spread on his hip and his soul line burning through his shirt, as he tries to hold himself in before he sprays the floor with shards of his heart. “Jon-”

Lovett turns on his heel, and his eyes are blazing, now, his voice just as low but dripping with heat. “How does the FBI know?”

Dan can’t breath.

“How does the FBI know, Dan?” Lovett repeats.

Lovett’s eyes are challenging, begging Dan to prove him wrong, begging Dan to say that no, no, he hasn’t lived up to every one of the expectations Lovett had the first time they met. “The CIA was going to arrest you. Crimes against the State. Espionage with the Soviets.”

Lovett turns away.

“They were going to throw you in a CIA black site. They would have tortured you.” Dan’s voice breaks. “One day, you would have disappeared and that would have been that. We’d never see you again. Tanya, Emily, _me_.”

Lovett squeezes his fist, his fingernails digging into the scar on his palm as he asks, for a third time. “How does the FBI know?”

Dan holds himself tighter. He can feel his skin searing. “I told them.”

Lovett takes a deep breath, and let’s it out. His fist loosens. He nods, to himself. “That’s what I thought.”

“We have time to get out,” Dan says, quickly, all the arguments he’d made to himself in that dank interrogation room seeming moldy and inadequate in the bright light of day. “We can rebuild. We can-”

Lovett closes his eyes. “I want you out.”

Dan shakes his head. “I can help. I can- I don’t know, I can lift boxes, I can make house calls, I can spread the warning, I can-”

“You’ve already done enough.” All the heat has seeped out of Lovett’s voice. “Get out.”

Dan takes an aborted step forward, but Lovett’s stepping away from him, three feet and a lifetime between them.

***

Knock, knock.

Dan frowns at the half-drunk bottle of whiskey in his hand. He doesn't feel nearly as disconnected as he's striving to be, but once the pounding in his head starts to manifest outside of it, he figures it's time to stop. Regretfully, he settles the bottle back onto his cocktail cart.

Knock, knock. 

"Pfeiffer, I know you're there, I can see the light."

Dan slides his frown down to the glass in his hand as he crosses the room in two strides

"Oh, thank god." Emily's on the other side of the door, her face half obscured by shadows. "_Help_ me."

She shifts and Dan's heart sinks as he recognizes Tanya, her head bowed and her hair obscuring her face, in Emily’s arms. "What happened?" He asks, as he drops his glass and slings Tanya's arm over his shoulders, pulling her to the couch. She groans weakly as he lifts her legs onto the cushions. "Where are you hurt?"

"Left side." Emily closes the door and locks it with all three bolts Dan never uses. She slides onto the coffee table, her knees shaking against Dan's shoulder. "It's glass. I didn't- I read an article in Life a couple months ago, said this cop's life was saved because they didn't remove the bullet from the wound, so, I left it in."

Emily bites her lip. Her eyes are clear and strong, her hands covered in blood where she's clasping them between her knees. She looks smaller, her shoulders rolled inwards and her stomach pulled up and in.

Dan squeezes her knee. "You did the right thing."

She nods, her eyes darting across Tanya's chest, from the way her breasts are fluttering with each labored breath to the gape in her sweater, the edges frayed and cauterized around the wound. "The FBI's watching the hospitals. I didn't know where else to go."

"I'm glad you came here," Dan promises, then shifts his attention. "I have to remove this," he warns, not waiting for a response before he rips along the seams of the sweater. Green cotton sticks to his fingers as they slip through the blood, and he leaves it hanging half off her. She looks smaller, too, the black lace of her bra set off against the sallow, olive shade of her skin.

"My favorite sweater," Tanya complains, wincing as she coughs. "Fuck."

"Send me the bill," Dan shrugs. "I'm unemployed now, so I'll just take it out of what you'll owe me for bleeding all over my couch."

"Sorry." Tanya chokes out a laugh. "Was it your favorite, too?"

Dan chuckles, "no, I've been meaning to get rid of this thing for ages. You're doing me a favor, really."

"Glad to be of service." Tanya coughs, letting it slide into a groan.

Emily leans forward, twisting her fingers with Tanyas. Dan can see the way their soul lines flare to life. He doesn't realize he's staring until Emily clears her throat. "Can you help her?"

Dan shifts onto his knees, wrenching his eyes to the wound. "It's quite shallow. Emily, will you grab the sewing kit from the front cabinet and the vodka from the liquor cart?"

Emily squeezes Tanya's hand and stands. Her knees are still trembling, but her voice is steady and bitter. "Would you like a glass to go with your vodka?"

Dan doesn't rise to her bait. "Yes, please."

When she sits back down, he pours a full glass and drops two sewing needles into it.

Her face flushes. "Oh."

"It's been a long time since I took field medic training," Dan shrugs at her, "but I do remember that you're supposed to save the drinking for _after_ the operation."

He lifts onto his knees to dribble the rest of the vodka on Tanya's side.

"Although, full disclosure, I've had an awful lot of whiskey already tonight."

Tanya laughs. Dan watches her muscles ripple around the wound as her laugh falls into a flash of pain. "Perfect, just, the perfect capper to a perfect fucking evening."

Dan winces as he reaches for the edge of the glass. "At least it's from a vodka bottle. Nature's disinfectant." He pulls it from her side and drops it onto the table.

"Fuck." Emily shivers, her hand tightening around Tanya's as she traces the edge of her soul line. "It looks so small to cause so much blood."

"It really is mostly superficial," Dan promises.

It only takes a couple of stitches, Tanya biting down on a wooden spoon Dan's never used to cook, her back trembling with the effort not to move. When he's done, he wipes her clean, apologizes for the ugly black stitches and spreads the largest bandage he can find over half her side.

Tanya groans, spitting out the spoon and lifting onto her elbow. "Give me the fucking whiskey."

Dan nods, spreading his hands onto his knees to push himself up, and sways.

"Woah," Emily catches him, her hands small and steady on his shoulder. "Stay, sit, I'll get them."

Dan nods again, his head feeling light and woozy. His fingers are stained with blood, the same blood that's oozing into the knees of his pants. Tanya's blood. Tanya's blood from- "Where is he?" Dan asks, his world spinning and his voice catching on the axis.

The table creaks as Emily sits next to him, pressing a glass into his hands. "Drink this."

Tanya reaches for her own and downs half of it, before she takes a deep breath. "We almost had enough time."

Dan can't feel his fingers. He can't feel his toes. He can't breath.

Emily squeezes his knee, spreading her fingers over his and Tanya continues, "your warning saved so many people."

Dan swallows. "It wasn't enough."

Tanya shakes her head. Her eyes are a little glassy but her complexion is looking better already. "There were a few stragglers. People we didn't know how to reach, or couldn't, and he-" She shakes his head. "Stubborn bastard kept quoting Edward Smith and spewing statistics from the Titanic."

Dan chokes out a laugh. "Sounds right."

Emily squeezes his knee. "He was the only one caught. He made sure we all got away."

"The glass?" Dan motions towards Tanya's wound. 

Emily snorts. "That's all her fault. Started a fight with a much bigger agent on our way out of the alley-"

"Started and won," Tanya corrects.

"- and got herself stabbed for her trouble. Fucking menace."

Tanya smiles at her softly, before turning back to Dan. "We need your help. To get him out."

"I don't work for the FBI anymore." Dan's chest aches. He tips his chin back, downing his entire glass. “The one and only time I’m allowed to step back into the building is to gather my things on the 27th, and we can’t wait that long. There's nothing I can do."

Emily shakes her head. "I've seen this before. They don't actually want to keep him, they just want the humiliation. If we pay his bail, they'll let him go."

Tanya tips her head back with a wince. "And someone to pay it. That agent saw me, and he wouldn't have taken it too lightly, being beaten by a queer."

Dan flinches. "I can help with both of those."

Emily smiles, her face softening and easing. "Yeah?"

Dan nods. "I was saving some money for a rainy day."

"Or a desert day," Tanya smiles at him, sadly, and Dan's chest clenches around the knowledge that Lovett had talked about California, talked about them, with her.

Dan nods. "No need anymore, though. We'll talk to Jon in the morning. He can help Emily pay it."

Emily nods, her smile turning into a yawn. "A plan. I like plans."

"In the morning," Dan repeats. "For now, you two take the bed."

Tanya tries to protest, but Emily mouths 'thank you' and drags half of Tanya's weight into Dan's bedroom.

Dan falls asleep to their muffled voices, rising and falling, first with laughter, then something softer.

***

“They’re late.” Tanya crosses her legs, grimacing as the movement pulls against her side.

Alyssa tuts, nodding at the wound, “no respect for my hard work.”

Tanya sighs, uncrossing and crossing her legs the other way. She’s still wearing the strappy red sandals she’d been wearing earlier, when Dan had dragged her to the morgue for Alyssa’s perusal.

“Who’s hard work?” Dan raises an eyebrow over his hair of the dog. He’d asked the bartender to add a splash of ginger ale, but he’s regretting it as the sugar crystalizes around his hangover.

“You’re right.” Alyssa waves at Tanya’s side, still bandaged half across her torso. Alyssa had added antiseptic cream and an extra two stitches, but, otherwise, had declared what’s done as done. “You should take full credit for that Frankenstenian disaster.”

Tanya shrugs as she self-medicates with a pink squirrel. “All my organs are in the right places, the rest I can live with.”

“Are you sure about that?” Alyssa raises an eyebrow.

Dan nods. “I put the spleen back in place and everything.”

“They’re saying the spleen isn’t necessary anymore,” Alyssa notes, finishing off her martini and waving Mary over for another round. “It’s only there because evolution hasn’t caught up yet. Troublesome organ.”

“Is it?” Dan asks. “Do many people die of spleen injuries?”

Alyssa shrugs. “More than you’d think.”

Tanya slams her drink down with more heft than strictly necessary. “Shouldn’t they be here by now? How long does it take to post bail?”

Dan takes a long sip and grimaces. It’s been exactly four hours and thirty-seven minutes since they parted ways, Tanya and him to the morgue and Emily and Jon to the FBI. Dan’s wrist watch is as heavy as a stone, threatening to pull him under a rushing river of crystal clear nightmare scenarios. Lovett, his knees drawn to his chest, shivering in the dark of a CIA black site, despite what Dan had given the Bureau. Jon and Emily, handcuffed and interrogated, thrown into the cells on either side of him, lavender marks on their own records to match the ones the FBI had stamped on every one of Dan’s documents before they let him loose. Lovett in a hospital room, too wounded to be released, too wounded to-

Dan shies away from the thought. He’s been shying away from the thought since he’d pulled the glass out of Tanya’s side fourteen hours ago. “I don’t know how long it takes to post bail for enemies of the state. I don’t exactly have a lot of experience with this.”

Tanya’s eyes narrow to slits, and Dan welcomes the mud she slings at him. “That is patently obvious.”

Dan wants to feel it. He wants to hurt. He wants to feel anything but the crushing weight of responsibility for what he set in motion the day he stepped into Lovett’s soul agency, waxing poetic about the immorality of soul matches when his was waiting just beyond the door. “I have the mark,” he pushes, unerringly, on her buttons.

She taps her heel against the floor. “You want a medal to go with that stamp?”

“I want you to stop pretending that I haven’t sacrificed anything.”

“How about what you gave up _before_ that sacrifice?” Her voice rises.

Alyssa’s eyes dart around the thankfully sparse bar. “I’m glad you two are getting out whatever this is, but, can you do it quietly, before we all get arrested for public indecency?”

Tanya leans back, crossing her arms over her chest, wincing at the pull but not unfurling. “It’d be what we deserve.”

Dan closes his eyes. “Tanya-”

She turns her chin, her eyes wet and glassy. “You want me to hurt you, I get that. Men like you, you’re always into that kinky flagellating stuff.”

Alyssa chokes on her drink.

“But, one of these days, you’re going to remember that knives have two edges, and the dull side can cut just as deep.”

Dan reaches out to touch her wrist, “Tanya,” but his apology is interrupted as Jon says, “you’re celebrating without us?”

Tanya whips around, swaying a little in her seat and Emily glances around before catching Tanya’s shoulder. Her fingers are still stained a little pink, even after scrubbing them for an hour this morning. Tanya reaches up to touch them, briefly, before pulling Emily into the seat next to hers and sliding her foot under Emily’s calf, hidden in the shadows of their bodies.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” Tanya sighs out the breath she’s been holding for hours.

“Sorry.” Emily reaches for the rest of Tanya’s drink and downs it. Her hands are shaking a little. “This is awful, what is this?”

“Pink squirrel,” Tanya says, quickly. “What took so long?”

Emily rolls her eyes. “So. Much. Paperwork. I don’t know how the FBI ever manages to carry out a raid, with the amount of paperwork it takes to undo one. I had to fill out so many forms, my hand is shaking.” 

She holds up her hand. It’s trembling, but, Dan’s seen shaking like that on many people as they left the FBI building and it’s not from reams of paperwork. He swallows, looking up at Jon, the question freezing in his throat.

“We got him out,” Jon says, sliding into the chair between Dan and Alyssa. The room breathes in audible relief. “He’s a little beat up, but, the FBI isn’t going to bother him again.”

Dan buries his hands between his knees, forcing himself not to ask. He hadn’t expected Lovett to traipse out of lockup and follow _Jon_ to a DC bar. Dan doesn’t expect that Lovett will spend a whole lot more time in bars for the rest of his life, Dan knows he won’t. But he had allowed himself to hope. He’d never allowed himself to hope before Lovett.

Jon crosses his legs, not looking away as he answers it, anyway. “He went home. A shower and some food and he kept mumbling something about a conspiracy? I don’t really know.”

Tanya frowns and Emily leans over her knees to touch Dan’s wrist. “We’ll talk to him, promise.”

Dan forces himself to nod in gratitude. He really needs another drink. He clears his throat. “Another round?”

***

Jon groans around his BLT on toasted wonder bread, “god, I’ve missed this.”

Dan takes a small bite of his own tuna salad and places it back in the basket. The cheddar is more sour and the tuna fish tinnier than he remembers. “You can still come here. You haven’t been unceremoniously kicked out of the FBI.”

Jon frowns, setting his own sandwich back down. “I wanted to turn myself in.”

There’s butter dripping down his fingers, and Dan almost feels bad for derailing the one good thing any of them have found in the past week. “No reason for both of us to go down in disgrace.” Dan reaches for a chip. He’s been eating Dotty’s home cut potato chips for over a decade, but he can barely taste it. “And we still might need someone on the inside.”

“I know.” Jon sighs. “Feels like a betrayal, though.”

Dan grabs another couple chips. “Another decade of that and you’ll be sitting where I am.”

Jon shivers. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“You can,” Dan promises. “You’re a better fucking agent than I ever was, you just have to get a little better at subterfuge. Like, maybe, not avoiding the best diner within walking distance of the Bureau.”

Jon sighs. “It’s not the same without you.”

“Tough shit.”

“You’re more of an asshole, now,” Jon says, pointedly. “And you should fucking eat something. You look terrible.”

Dan takes a bite of his sandwich, chewing exaggeratedly. “Better?”

“No.” Jon pushes his basket away. “Can we go now?”

“You can.” Dan reaches for another chip. “I’ll be twenty minutes or so behind you.”

Jon frowns. “That’s ridiculous. It’s your last day in the building-”

“Exactly.”

“-and you need an agent to supervise you.”

Dan cringes. “And it’s not going to be you.”

“Dan.”

“Agent Favreau.” Dan glares at him. “Don’t forget that.”

Jon pushes his chair back loud enough to scratch against the floor.

“And we’re still on for dinner, yeah?” Dan asks, innocently.

Jon flips him off as he lets Dotty’s glass door slam behind him.

***

Dan’s somewhat regretting his easy dismissal of Jon an hour later, when there’s two agents he doesn’t know standing guard at his office door and a third surveying Dan’s belongings for, Dan assumes, classified state secrets and evidence of Dan’s secret homosexuality.

The third agent’s flipping a frame up and down - “it’s a picture of my brother and his kid,” Dan tries to tell him - when they’re both distracted by a commotion at the door.

“You don’t know who I am? Agent Pfeiffer knows me, he’d want to see me.”

“There’s no agent by that name who works at the FBI.”

“Oh, you’re a funny boy, too? Even all those muscles won’t make me laugh at _that_. I’ve got some better material, if you’d like to get a drink after this and learn a thing or two.”

Dan holds up his hand as the third agent takes a step towards the door. He says, loud enough for the guard agents to hear, too, “it’s really easier to just let him in.”

Both agents sigh deeply and Dan smiles, perversely, as Lovett steps on both their feet as he squeezes between them. He looks awful. His shirt is hanging off him, like he’s been eating even less than Dan has. His hair is unwashed and Dan can see the yellowing bruises on his arms and his cheeks. There’s a white bandage on his upper arm and another on his temple. Dan wants nothing more than to step forward, to touch him, to pull up those bandages and make sure that someone took care of him when he wouldn’t let Dan do it.

“Where do you even find oafs this stupid?” Lovett asks, his eyes darting around Dan’s office. They’re bright and unfocused. “You must be scraping the dregs of the barrel.”

“I don’t work here anymore, so, I wouldn’t know.” Dan motions around his office. The agents had torn it apart the morning he was brought in, and most of his belongings are strewn across the floor in shattered glass and torn pages from files and books.

Lovett steps gingerly into the room. “Tanya said you’d be packing up today. Liberal use of the word, I guess. I don’t know why you’re bothering.”

“Honestly?” Dan drops the photo he’s holding back to his desk and tries to think around the thudding in his chest and the heat in his palm, just at being close to Lovett, just at knowing that Lovett asked about him. “Me either.”

Lovett nods, crouching down to pick up a copy of _Invisible Man_, half its pages torn out. “This is a worse crime than anything we’ve ever been accused of.”

Dan chokes out a laugh. It’s shaky and dusty, like he had to pull it off an unused shelf to use it. “I might have been using books to trade secrets to the Soviets, hadn’t you heard?”

“No.” Lovett looks up, catching Dan’s eyes for only a moment before flicking away. “Only to the queers.”

Dan swallows. “Yeah. That one was true.”

“Yeah.” Lovett stands, the book still in his hand. “We still have that in common.”

Dan takes a deep breath. “How’s Tanya?”

Lovett shakes his head, his eyes flashing. There he is, the Lovett Dan’s so desperately in love with that he gave up everything for just one night at the center of his passion and focus. “We’re not doing this.”

Dan has to hold back his smile as he leans forward, tapping his fingers against the mess of papers on his desk. “What are we doing?”

Lovett pulls a roll of paper from his waistband. He steps forward, dropping a photo and what looks like a typewritten form onto Dan’s desk. “I unlocked the Resnik case.”

Dan picks up the photo. “This is the photo you stole from my office.”

Lovett nods. “You took it, at the crime scene.”

Dan remembers. Back when he thought he could buck the FBI, disappear down the docks and a closed crime scene with only a slap on the wrist as his reprimand. Dan frowns down at the hand in the photo. It niggles at the back of his mind, almost familiar. “You figured out who’s it is?”

Lovett nods. “I knew there was something odd about it. That day I left you at The Tabard-”

Dan remembers that too. The thrill of Lovett’s palm in his, the jolt of his scar laid out under Dan’s eyes. The speed with which he left.

“I knew it was Victor's, I just didn’t know what it meant, until-”

Dan shivers at Victor's name and for the way Lovett reaches around him, his body stretching to reach for the typewritten form he’d dropped on the desk. He slides it into Dan’s hands, covering the photo.

“I remembered this form.” Lovett looks up at him, his eyes still dark and focused on something, somewhere, that isn’t here and isn’t Dan. “Vietor was set up. Someone wanted him to take the fall for Resnik’s murder.”

“How do you know that?” Dan asks as he looks down, scanning the form. It’s for a soulmate match, signed by Alroy Walsh and dates a little over a year ago for- Dan whistles. “Fuck, if I knew soulmate matches went for $500, I would have bought a matching mate agency long ago.”

“They don’t,” Lovett sighs. “I can-” He flinches. “I could barely pay to keep the lights on in the Swamp Club with the measly dollars I made at the Agency.”

Every one of Dan’s FBI sensors clang and flash in his mind. “This is for a fake soul match?”

Lovett nods, slowly. “This is the last case my business partner worked on before he skipped town. I always knew there was something fishy about it, but I couldn’t figure out what until I saw the photo.”

Dan lifts the photo again, frowning at it. He’s definitely seen it before. “This is Vietor’s?”

Lovett nods as he reaches over, tracing the soul line down the center of the palm. His body radiates heat, close enough that Dan wants to close his eyes, drink it in, let it fill in all the cracks in his chest. “I’ve seen this line before, and it wasn’t on Katie Resnik.”

Dan nods. “So have I, but-”

Lovett interrupts. “Resnik was from Moscow. I found her birth certificate in the FBI’s files-” Dan opens his mouth to ask how, but Lovett talks over him. “Someone set Vietor up for the murder of a false soulmate with ties to the Soviets.”

Dan swallows. “Fuck.” He looks up, into Lovett’s wild eyes and wilder curls. “Who? Why?”

Lovett slides onto his heels and takes a step back. “I don’t know, I just run a soul agency, you’re the fucking detective. The who and the why is for you to figure out.”

“I can take it to the Director,” Dan sighs, “but he’s not going to do anything about it.”

“He certainly is not.” Axe says, his voice cold. He squeezes one of the agent’s shoulders as he steps past him and into Dan’s office. “Thank you, Slatz, for coming to get me.”

Slatz smirks and Lovett mutters, “fitting name,” under his breath.

Dan has to agree with him.

“I don’t know what two convicted criminals are doing in the FBI - Slatz, figure out who let them through security and make sure they’re fired - but if you’re not out in the next three minutes, I will have you both arrested.”

Lovett - who’s still, after all this time, after Dan’s betrayal and after an entire night in a jail cell, so much braver than Dan could ever hope to be - steps forward. “Last I heard, you still have an agent undercover with the most dangerous criminal group in the country. He’s in trouble. He’s walking into a trap. You still care about him, don’t you?”

“I know what you think of me, sir,” Dan says, so quietly he has to clear his throat and start again, “but you should listen to him. Victor's cover is blown. He’s in trouble.”

“I don’t need to listen to either of you,” Axe says, coldly. “And if either of you so much as breathe a word of Resnik or the Blacks or Vietor to _anyone_, I will hand you over to the CIA and I won’t think twice about it. You hear me?”

Axe turns on his heel.

“Make sure they’re walked directly to the front door. Pfeiffer’s given up the privilege of his belongings. Have everything in this room destroyed.”

***

Dan fumbles the key in his lock. Half his mind is on the photo still tucked into the back of his pants and half is on the look Lovett had given him, equal parts betrayal and pleading, when they parted ways outside the FBI building. Dan had wanted to reach out for him, beg him for something, nothing nearly as big as forgiveness or a second chance, but something more than the bread crumbs Lovett had given him with the photo and the soul match order form.

The key finally clicks and Dan sighs with relief, pushing the door open and heading directly for the liquor cart before he registers his phone ringing. And ringing. And ringing.

Dan sighs, dropping his keys and the photo on the couch as he leans over it. “Pfeiffer here.”

“Dan.” Jon’s voice is breathless.

“Fuck.” Dan glances at his watch. “Dinner, I’m sorry, I got held up. Raincheck?”

“Dan?” Jon’s voice is distant, and drifts farther away as he chants, “fuck, fuck, hold on, please, I’m getting help, you just need to hold on for a little longer.”

A sliver of cold slides down Dan’s spine. “Jon? What’s happening?”

“Dan?” Jon says, for a third time, his voice drifting back. “How quickly can you get to my apartment?”

Dan’s already reaching for his keys. “As quickly as you need me.”

“_Now_,” Jon pleads.

“I’m on my way,” Dan says, but the phone’s already dead. Dan swears, dropping the phone where he stands and racing out the door.


	6. PART VI

“Where does it hurt?”

Jon crouches down next to Dan and growls, “maybe where there’s a bullet lodged into his leg.”

“Where _else_ does it hurt?” Dan clarifies as, for the second time in as many days, he spreads a home remedy kit on the coffee table next to him. He’s going to have to send a letter to Professor- Fuck, he doesn’t even remember his name, that’s how long it’s been and how correspondingly rusty his skills must be. Dan reaches for one of Jon’s expensive washcloths as he asks, “do you remember the name of our field medic prof at Quantico?”

“The one with the cowlick?” Jon frowns.

“Professor Flatwick,” Tommy offers, groaning as he twists on Jon’s living room floor. 

There were a lot of things Dan had been expecting to find on the other end of Jon’s phone call, starting with Jon in the throws of a panic attack and following on down through the death of a family member to the unlikely potential of Lovett in Jon’s living room. 

Nothing could have prepared Dan, though, to find a member of the Blacks - an undercover CIA operative working with the Blacks, Dan reminds himself, although it does nothing to dispel the image of the Blacks banging down Jon’s front door with the same guns they used on Tommy - bleeding out on Jon’s expensive oriental carpet. The same oriental carpet Jon’s mother insisted was ‘good for the hardwood’ as his father grumbled ‘you’re sure it wasn’t made by the Japs?’ They repeat the story every time they’re in town, and Dan can replay the entire argument, complete with his own ’that’s really not the proper term, anymore, when I was living in Japan, it was considered fairly offensive.’ Which is perhaps why Dan is one of Jon’s father’s least favorite people.

Dan’s tempted to help Tommy right back out the window he’d crawled through. To let him bleed on the way back down, the way he had on the way up - Jon’s never going to get the red hand print off his stark white windowsill - as penance for so thoroughly and irreversibly destroying the world Dan had known. As penance for the three bullets that set the last few months in motion - from that innocent woman’s death on down through the stitches in Tanya’s side and the rubble that was once the Swamp Club and Dan’s promising career - because even now that the dust has settled, whether he pulled the trigger or not, it’s still Tommy on the other side, his hand on the gun. 

But Dan wouldn’t trade the pain of losing Lovett for the cost of not having him at all, and, Dan figures, he has as much to thank Tommy for as to blame him. The world Tommy had cracked open was cruel and unforgiving and had asked more of Dan than he should have ever been ready or able to give. It just took an earth-shattering experience or two for him to realize it.

Jon looks up from where he’s crouched at Tommy’s side, his face wide and open and his eyes the deepest, swampiest shade of brown. Jon holds his hand out, his palm streaked with Tommy’s blood but his soul line shining under it, and Dan feels his own heat in response.

Dan nods, turning his focus back on Tommy. His own voice cracks as he tries to lighten it. “Fractures for Flitwick, that’s right. I’d almost forgotten.”

Tommy chuckles, thick and craggly. His blond hair is matted to his forehead, giving off the impression that his forehead is receding faster than it already is. He’s wearing the same expensive suit he’d been wearing at O’Malley’s, weeks ago now, and Dan says a silent apology to Tommy’s tailor as he brings Jon’s kitchen scissors to the cuff of Tommy’s pant leg. Tommy closes his eyes, dropping his head back against the pillows. He breathes out of his nose. “You called him that, too?”

“I’m not that old,” Dan argues, sliding the scissors through the fabric. “This is going to hurt a little bit,” he warns as he reaches the top of Tommy’s thigh and doesn’t wait for a response before he pulls the frayed fabric back from where it’s stuck to Tommy’s skin in dark, globs of blood.

“Fuck.” Tommy’s face is pale and he throws his good arm over his eyes. His breath catches. “Keep doing that and I’ll make a crack about your balding spot.”

“Go right ahead and keep disparaging the man saving your life.” Dan drops the scissors to his side and, without stripping his voice of a touch of humor, turns to Jon. “Grab me a pair of tweezers.”

“Any particular size?” Jon asks, his eyes catching Dan’s for a flash of gratitude as he pulls himself up and into the bathroom.

“Bring me whatever you’ve got,” Dan calls back, before lowering his head to Tommy’s. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

Tommy lifts his arm, turning his head to blink at Dan. “I wouldn’t be here if I had any other choice.” His eyes are like glaciers, cool and glassy and drained of pigmentation. There’s blood seeping from his temple and Dan presses the washcloth to it.

“You’re putting Jon in danger,” Dan pushes, pressing down, harder than strictly necessary.

Tommy swallows. His skin is tinged yellow. “Don’t you think I know that? It’d be fucking killing me if the bullet wasn’t doing it first.”

“I’m going to save you from the bullet,” Dan promises. In the bathroom, he can hear Jon shuffling frantically through his medicine cabinet, and Dan slides his voice, low and steady, under the sound. “But if Jon is hurt, then it won’t matter how well I remember my field training, because I will hunt you down and finish the job myself.”

“I’ll sign that deal in blood.” For a moment, Tommy’s eyes flash with ice-white heat, before they side back to nothing.

“You might have to.” Dan swears. “Stay with me, Vietor, I’m not losing you now, fucking bastard.”

Jon falls to his knees next to Dan with a thump and holds up three sets of tweezers. “I think I used the smaller one on a roast once, but otherwise they’re clean.”

“I assumed you burned it?” Dan asks as he reaches for the bottle of antiseptic Jon had brought with him. He winces at the thought of the vodka he’d had to used on Tanya. “The roast, I mean.”

Jon snorts and takes the bottle, splashing it over the tweezers and staining the knees of his pants. “Of course I did.”

“Figures.” Dan laughs, taking them back and nodding at Jon’s reading lamp. “Bring that close. This is going to hurt a whole hell of a lot, but I need you to keep him talking.”

Jon nods, pulling the light low over Tommy’s thigh, wincing as Dan uses more of the antiseptic to clean the skin around the wound.

Tommy moans, faint and reedy. His thigh shakes under Dan’s hands.

Dan grits his teeth. “I said to keep him awake.”

“Right.” Jon turns his chin away. “Now seems as good a time as any for you to tell us what happened, right? Start at the beginning.”

“What qualifies as the beginning?” Tommy coughs, turning his head to look at Jon. His thigh pulls and twists and Dan grimaces as he uses his forearm to keep Tommy steady. “The day my dad first showed me how to shoot a gun?” Tommy closes his eyes as Dan edges the tweezers into the wound. “The day I first saw you, in the student center? You were so young, then, not a grey hair or a wisp out of place, even as you pounded away at that poor vending machine.”

The light shakes and Dan looks up to see Jon’s eyes, wet and dark in the flickering light. “Steady,” Dan murmurs.

Jon warps his fingers around his wrist and the light flattens. “I remember. It gave you orange cream, no matter what button you pressed.”

Tommy grimaces as Dan bites his lips and the tweezers around the bullet. “You were trying to reason with it with your fists.”

Jon chuckles. “I’ve always hated orange cream.”

“I remember.” Tommy cries out as Dan get the bullet out and drops it onto the washcloth next to him. Dan grimaces, reaching for the antiseptic and pouring it into the wound as Tommy shakes, his back arching off the floor. “Fuck, warn a guy, yeah?”

“A warning would only make it worse.” Dan rubs his thumb along the edges and grabs a needle. “It looks okay.”

“Do you know what a bullet wound should look like?”

“Not particularly,” Dan shrugs.

“Good to know.” Tommy twists his head and looks back up at Jon. His voice is thin, punctuated by gasps in rhythm with Dan’s stitches. “I think there’s a mole in the Blacks.”

Jon glances at Dan. “We think so, too. Have for a little while now. What happened tonight?”

“It was a routine raid.” Tommy’s eyes slide closed momentarily, before he forces them open again. “Normal, you know? Bar manager hadn’t made rent for a few months, O’Malley sent me in to teach him a lesson.”

Jon flinches and Dan spares a moment to be grateful that Jon can still be affected by the casual violence of street gangs.

“The manager fought back.” Tommy shrugs, then groans and freezes his shoulders. “They were outmanned. It should have been easy. It was easy.”

Jon frowns down at Tommy’s leg, his throat moving audibly. “All this from a stray bullet?”

Tommy shakes his head. “It wasn’t a stray. I saw him shoot- I looked into his eyes and- I know him. It was one of ours.” Tommy swallows and corrects. “One of the Blacks. He saw me, I _know_ he saw me, and he shot anyway.”

Dan swallows as he ties off the thread and covers the stitches with gauze. “Not as good as a hospital, but it’s clean and it should hold as long as you don’t put too much pressure on it. All you can do for it now is to rest.”

Jon nods. “You can take the bed, I’ll stay on the couch.”

Tommy struggles onto his elbows, and then into a sitting position. “I have to leave.”

“Tonight?”

“Right now.” 

Tommy lists sideways and Jon drops the lamp so he can catch Tommy’s shoulder. Even in the low light, Tommy looks pale. “Don’t be stupid. You can stay here tonight, and we can make a plan in the morning.”

“So that the Blacks will see me leaving the apartment of an FBI agent?” Tommy scoffs. “Don’t be daft. They’re already out looking for me, but if I bring back the knowledge of the mole, that should be enough to forgive the missing time.”

“You’re going back there?” Jon hisses. “After what happened tonight?” 

He sits back, letting Tommy go so quickly that Dan has to slide into his place, catching Tommy against his chest. Tommy’s entire body is shaking. Dan wishes he had antibiotics for the bullet wound. Dan wishes he had an alternative to what he knows Tommy has to do.

“What happened tonight,” Tommy says, slow and labored as his eyes narrow, “is that someone betrayed the most dangerous gang in the District.”

Jon squeezes his knees, hard enough that Dan can see his hands going white and pink. “Oh, yes, the perfect reason to go _back there_.”

Tommy puts one hand on Dan’s bicep, using it to leverage himself forward. “It is. It is the perfect reason. I’ve been working with the Blacks for five years - _five years_, Jon, you of all people know just how much I gave up for this cover - and now the last piece has been handed to me on a silver platter.”

“Or they’ll be serving your head on fine Russian fucking china.”

Tommy shakes his head. "I've already been gone too long. They'll have people out looking for me, but, with this kind of intel, it should be enough to smooth all that over _and_ get me into the inner circle. But I have to go. Now." His fingers tighten around Dan's arm. "Help me up?"

Dan doesn't look at Jon as he gets an arm around Tommy's shoulders, his hands around Tommy's elbow and his hip to leverage him up with the least damage. Jon may never forgive Dan, Jon may never understand because, despite everything - despite spending his days investigating the country's worst crimes, despite the raid, despite the love of his life crawling, bloody and battered, through his fucking window - Jon still assumes the best in every situation. But Dan knows what Tommy knows. Dan knows that situations aren't good or bad, situations just are, and it's people who give them valence. People like Tommy, people like Dan.

Jon scrambles to his feet, putting himself between Tommy and the door. "Why'd you come here? Why'd you come here if you were just going to throw your life away anyway?"

Tommy shrugs, like it's the easiest answer in the world. "I came here because I didn't know who else I could trust."

"Oh, you trusted me?" Jon spits. "You trusted me to patch you up first and ask questions later."

Tommy nods. "Yes."

"Tommy-"

"And now I'm trusting you to let me go."

Jon drops his chin, shaking his head. "You might get yourself killed."

Tommy smiles sadly. "I've got two legs under me again. I can defend myself."

"What if that's not enough?"

"It always has been, before."

Jon's mouth twists. "Fucking god complex."

Tommy laughs a little, short and chopped, and pushes fully out of Dan's grip. "Someday it's gonna get me killed."

"That's my line."

"I know," Tommy whispers. He reaches for the door, turning the knob. "For what it's worth, I don't wanna die."

Jon nods, whispering, "please don't," as the door opens and closes.

Jon slides to the floor, his knees pressed to his chest. "Fuck."

***

“Let’s go over it again.” Jon wrings his hands, his knees bumping into Dan’s armchair before he turns and paces in the other direction.

Dan takes a slow sip of his coffee. “I’d offer you a cup, but you clearly don’t need it.”

“Tommy’s soul match was faked. Bought for by- who?”

Dan leans forward, dangling his mug between his knees. “Lovett-” He has to swallow around Lovett’s name and the rush of emotions squeezing his chest so tightly that they climb up his throat, threatening to come out in either a primal scream or an unearthly sob. Dan doesn’t want to find out which. “He said that sometimes parents buy more respectable soul matches for their gay children.”

Jon freezes mid-stride. “That’s disgusting.”

Dan swallows and pushes, gently, “Tommy’s from a good family. Could his father-?”

“His father passed away while he was at the Academy.”

“Mother?” Dan shrugs. “Grandparents?”

Jon’s brow furrows. “I don’t know. I want to think not, but-” He shivers. “What if my parents had bought me a soulmate?”

“Then you’d have those three kids and that four-bedroom colonial in Virginia and a hell of a lot less headaches. Probably a few less scars, too.”

“There was a time when that’s all I wanted.”

Dan smiles sadly at him. “I know. It wasn’t all that long ago.”

“Do you ever wish your parents had saved you from all of this?” Jon motions around Dan’s apartment. 

Dan loves this apartment. He’d paid the security deposit with his first bonus check from the Bureau, and he’d had plans to retire here. But even with the packets of casserole powder and cans of chicken soup he’s been eating, the little he has saved in the bank won’t stretch to more than three rent payments. He’s already earmarked the cabinet - an antique from his grandmother - and his mother’s good china for the antique dealer in Georgetown, but that still won’t last him the year.

Still, Dan never wanted the house in the suburbs. He never wanted the burden of a mortgage or a monthly car payment. He never wanted the endless commute or the picket fence. At times, he thought he wanted the three mouths to feed, but never the woman they’d come from. Even when he tries to picture her, with a friendly smile and a killer laugh and a curtain of dark hair that would tickle his chest when she kissed him, the platonic ideal of her doesn’t hold a candle to the reality of Lovett, to the twist of his lips as he smirks or his frenetic sense of humor or the curls Dan still sees every morning in the liminal moment between sleep and waking.

“No,” Dan whispers, “I don’t wish that for anything in the world.”

Jon nods slowly. “Me either. I would have always known I was missing something.” 

“Missing everything.”

“Yeah.” Jon unfreezes, like a wind-up toy that runs on deviant energy, and offers his next theory. “You don’t think it was the CIA, do you?”

Dan takes a long swig of his coffee and gets up to refill his mug. “If Senator McCarthy is to be believed, there are Soviet spies at all levels of government.”

“If Senator McCarthy is to be believed, you’re a Soviet spy.”

“No,” Dan corrects him, “I’m just an easy target. Because homosexuals are weak and vulnerable, obviously.”

“I’d like to see Senator McCarthy survive raid after raid,” Jon mutters. “You’re saying he might be right, though?”

Dan sighs, swearing as he burns his fingers on his scalding mug. “I’m saying even a broken Senator is right twice a day.”

“Maybe.” Jon’s mouth twists, doubtfully. “But why buy Tommy the most expensive soulmate in the country only to murder her a few months later?”

It’s the question that’s been running on rinse ever since Lovett showed him the soul match forms. “They wanted to set him for her murder to destabilize his position in the Blacks?”

“Only it didn’t work so his Blacks contact had to try and take him out,” Jon says, finishing that line of argument.

Dan shrugs. “Maybe.”

“In which case,” Jon sighs, “the CIA no longer has his back and we should rescue him.”

“Or,” Dan holds up a hand, “there’s a mole in the Blacks who’s trying to take Tommy out because he’s a trusted confidant at the top of the organization.”

Jon drops onto the coffee table, burying his fingers in his hair. “In which case, we shouldn’t rescue him.”

“Schrodinger’s cat.”

“I don’t think that’s what that means.”

“Faustian’s Bargain.”

“I don’t think that’s what that means, either.”

The phone rings, interrupting a third, embarrassing attempt at a metaphor. Dan reaches for it. “Pfeiffer here.”

“Agent Pfeiffer, Agent Rhodes.”

Dan raises an eyebrow and kicks Jon’s ankle to get his attention. “I’m not an agent anymore.”

“You’re still the best damn investigative agent in or outside of the Bureau,” Ben scoffs.

Dan’s eyes widen. “That’s awfully kind of you, but-”

“I have some information you might find useful,” Ben interrupts. “Meet me at The Tabard, you know the one?”

Dan nods. “I’m very familiar.”

“30 minutes.”

“Are you going to tell me-?” Dan stops as the dial tone starts to beep on the other end of the line. He looks at Jon. “Grab your coat, we’re going to The Tabard.”

***

Mary greets them with a smile and a wink, “there’s a very handsome young gentleman waiting for you in the back booth.”

“Can’t possibly be who we’re meeting then.” Dan squeezes her shoulder. “Two whiskey sours, please, Mary? I think we’re going to need them.”

Ben’s waiting for them at Alyssa’s favorite table, the one in a dark enough corner to mostly cover them from the prying eyes of the FBI and CIA agents who frequent the joint. He has a thick folder in front of him and he’s drumming his fingers against it. There’s a still-full glass at his elbow, with two dried cherries sitting in a rim of foam at the top of it. “Thank you for making the time on such short notice, Agent Pfeiffer. This won’t take long.”

Dan hooks his ankle around a chair and pulls it out. “I can’t tell if that’s a jab at my current unemployment or not.”

“Take from it what you will.” Ben nods at Jon. “Long time no see, Agent Favreau.”

Jon slides into his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. “Cut the niceties, you pigheaded, ego-driven asshole.”

Ben pauses, then laughs to himself, shaking his head. “Apologies, gentleman, we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

“Yeah,” Jon agrees. “When you infiltrated our monthly poker game to call me a dumbass.”

“Or when you called us off the Resnik case,” Dan argues, parroting, “take whichever you will.”

Ben sighs, pushing the folder forward. “Hopefully, this can go a little way to make up for that.”

“Doubtful,” Dan shrugs.

Jon, though, is already leaning forward, his curiosity quickly chasing the grudge across his face. “What is it?”

“Transcripts.” Ben opens the folder to the first page and points to the date. “Started over a year ago, between the Blacks’ inner circle.”

Jon scans the first page, then hands it to Dan. “This is an awful lot to go through. What do they say?”

“This is a fraction of what we have,” Ben shrugs. “The majority of it’s just normal chatter, most at the Agency would say all of it is. But there’s a few parts that have been niggling at me for months. Those are the ones in this folder.”

Dan quickly reads through the top page. “Niggling isn’t very scientific.”

“How much of this job is?” Ben asks. “Agent to agent? There’s something in here that doesn’t feel right.”

Dan puts the page down. “Why not have your agents take a look at it?”

“My agents are more interested in protecting an asset than a man’s life,” Ben spits, letting a touch of anger into his voice. 

Jon sits up straight. “Ben-”

“Your continued investigation into this case hasn’t gone unnoticed. I know that you know things you’re not sharing.” Ben taps the folder. “If anyone can make sense of what’s in here, it’s you two.”

Dan sighs. “I don’t have any resources anymore.”

“When has that ever stopped you before?” Ben smiles sadly. “And for what it’s worth, it’s a shame what’s happened to you. I’ve been following your career, and the Bureau is going to rue the day they let you go for such short-sighted bullshit.”

Dan blinks. That’s the first time someone has said something like that to him who wasn’t at the raid that night. “Ahh, thanks. That means a lot, really.”

Ben nods, pushing his chair back. “Repay me by forgetting I was ever here.”

“Ben-” Jon starts, a million questions on his tongue that Dan knows Ben can’t, or won’t, answer.

“You have my word,” Dan nods, holding out his hand and feeling an embarrassing thrill when Ben doesn’t shy away from him.

“Good luck,” Ben says, before stepping back and into the darkness of The Tabard.

“What the fuck?” Jon asks.

Dan sighs, nodding at the folder. “I guess we better get started. Hand me a stack.”

Jon finds the first tab and hands Dan everything under it. They read in silence for a long time. Long enough to work through three whiskey sours each, long enough for The Tabard to empty out of lunch customers and start filling in with early evening workers, long enough for Dan’s eyes to go gritty and achy. 

Dan’s about to suggest they call a break, refuel with enough steak and butter to last the night, when he sees it.

“What?” Jon asks, sleepily, taking a sip from his drink without raising his head.

“I figured it out.” Dan grips the page tightly in his hands. “Call the others.”

***

"I got him here," Tanya announces when Dan opens the door, shoving Lovett in in front of her. "It's your job to convince him to stay."

Lovett looks better than he did in Dan's office. His hair is washed and his shirt is clean and there's a pink in his cheeks and a heat in the way he's holding his shoulders that speaks to the defiance that was missing in the muted, defeated Lovett Dan had last seen. Dan's world spins at just the sight of him, colors seeping into every dull crack, energy sparking across every idle surface.

Dan trips over the edge of his carpet as he falls in love all over again.

Lovett doesn’t look at him as he steps into the living room. His voice bounces off every wall and Dan knows how much colder and how much dimmer the apartment will feel when he’s gone again. “I’m not staying. I’m only here as a favor to a friend,” he nods at Tanya, “and to make sure you didn’t fuck her up forever and then I’m- who the fuck are they?”

Dan steps into the room behind him. He can feel the heat off Lovett’s body and he has to force himself to look away, towards where Elijah is sitting on the couch, an egg salad sandwich in his hand and leaking onto the edge of the file Ben had given them. Dan motions towards him - “this is Agent Elijah Cone and this” - he points at Pri as she rolls her eyes and hands Elijah a wad of napkins - “is Priyanka Aribindi. Don’t let her lack of title fool you, it’s only the FBI’s loss.”

Pri waves. “I brought sandwiches. There’s a turkey and a ham and Pfeiffer made sure I got a tuna melt.”

Dan’s close enough to see the twitch in Lovett’s shoulders. “He’s trying to buy favor with fucking tuna.”

“And cheddar,” Dan shrugs. “Comes with a pretty great pickle, too.”

Lovett steps forward to grab it, scowling, “this isn’t going to work.”

Dan shrugs. “Whatever you say.”

“As fun as this little tête-à-tête is,” Jon interrupts, “can we get started?”

Alyssa uncurls her legs from where she’s been sitting, cross-legged, on the couch next to Elijah. “Let me just check over Tanya and then-”

Jon growls, his hands clenching against his sides as he turns on his heel and keeps pacing. Dan would be worried about that strip of floor, if he was going to be here long enough to deal with the after effects.

Tanya watches him carefully, then sits next to Alyssa, already unbuttoning her shirt. “It’s okay, we can do this here.” She slides her shirt off one shoulder, lifting her undershirt so that Alyssa can reach the white bandage underneath.

Emily slides onto the floor across from them, kneeling up to reach for a sandwich. “Anyone mind if I take the turkey?” She asks, her eyes darting between it and Tanya.

Elijah’s staring, eyes wide as they rake over Tanya’s stomach, the long lines of dark skin and the bleach white of the medical tape. Pri hits his shoulder as she nods at Emily. “All yours. I’m Pri.”

Elijah rubs his arm. “I wasn’t staring. Just- that’s quite a wound.”

“I’m quite a clumsy person,” Tanya shrugs and Alyssa tsks. “I’m Tanya, this is Emily, and that asshole over there’s Lovett, since Pfeiffer can’t be bothered to introduce us.”

Dan grimaces as he pulls his eyes away from the tuna dripping down Lovett’s fingers. “Sorry, there’s an awful lot going through my mind right now-”

“Please,” Jon motions towards the table, “fucking enlighten us.”

Dan tries to catch his eye. Jon’s been on edge since Tommy left nothing but a bloody handprint and a lifetime of questions in his apartment, but he’s been teetering on the wrong side since they left The Tabard. If he isn’t careful, he’s going to spill their cover and then Dan isn’t going to be the only one with a lavender triangle stamped all over his papers. 

Jon, though, keeps his head turned stubbornly away and Dan sighs. He leans forward, spreading his hands on his knees. “Over the last few days, new information has come to light in the Resnik case that suggests a much deeper conspiracy than either the FBI or the CIA are willing to investigate. If I’m right-”

Jon stops pacing. His chest is shaking as he breathes heavily. “Stop beating around the fucking bush.”

Dan reaches for the page he’d earmarked in Ben’s file. “Does this name look familiar?” He asks, handing it to Lovett.

Lovett startles, reaching for the page so carefully that their fingers don’t brush. “Me? Isn’t this a question for one of the brutes you call agents?”

“This question,” Dan swallows, “is why you’re here.”

Lovett drops his sandwich and raises an eyebrow.

“Mostly,” Dan amends, because he’s not about to admit _I needed to see you_ in front of anyone, and he’s definitely not going to admit _I can’t breathe without you_ infront of Pri and Elijah, who know about Dan’s dishonorable discharge but not the nature of it. Dan couldn’t bare the fruitlessness of it, when Lovett’s still not looking at him and Lovett’s still not talking directly to him.

Lovett frowns, dropping his eyes to the paper and freezes. “Fuck. I know this name.”

“I thought so.” Dan grimaces. “He’s the one who bought Resnik and Victor's soul match.”

Lovett nods.

“He’s a member of the Blacks. Inner circle, if these transcripts are to be believed.” Dan shuffles through Ben’s file for a few more pages. “And does this sound familiar?”

Lovett frowns as he reads them, his eyebrow rising the further he gets and his mouth twisting even deeper. Finally, he looks up, his eyes actually catching Dan’s, bright with indignation. “Are they talking about me?”

Dan’s heart thumps wildly and he has to force a smile off his face. Nothing - nothing except for the fact that Lovett’s looking at him - is good about this. “I’m pretty sure.”

“This is offensive. And vaguely anti-Semitic.”

“Not vaguely,” Dan agrees. “Although I don’t know what more we were expecting from a criminal organization.”

“Some fucking respect,” Lovett argues, his shoulders slumping as he reads the next page. “They picked my agency particularly. They thought I’d be easy to manipulate.”

Dan swallows. “Yeah.”

“They used me.”

“Yeah.”

Lovett looks up again, the brightness in his gaze glazed with questions. “Why?”

“Because you were vulnerable,” Dan says, quietly. “Did you know about your partner’s gambling debts?”

Lovett sighs. “I always thought he was skimming a bit off the top.”

“He was, but that had nothing on the $500 they gave him. Enough to clear his debts and skip town, I’d bet.”

“Yeah.” Lovett points to a bit of conversation between the Blacks’ inner circle. “And me-?”

Dan nods. “Yeah, they knew you were vulnerable too.”

“Fuck.” The pages shake in Lovett’s hands and Dan wants to lean forward, wants to take them, wants to remind Lovett that the Swamp Club was important enough to warrant a little vulnerability. Dan wants to promise that the Swamp Club isn’t to blame for the fake soul match or everything that happened after or might still happen to Tommy if they can’t rescue him in time.

Alyssa rips the medical tape and taps the new bandage in place, pulling Tanya’s shirt down over it as she looks up. “You’re saying the Blacks paid for a fake soul match for an undercover CIA agent?” Dan nods. “Fuck.” Alyssa sighs. “What I still don’t understand, though, is why that poor girl had to die?”

Dan takes a deep breath. “Because they know that he’s an undercover CIA agent. They set him up for her death, hoping that the CIA would take care of him.”

Jon’s breath catches. “Why didn’t they just take him out?”

Pri raises onto her knees, shuffling through the pages in Ben’s file. “Because the leader of the Blacks trusts Vietor. Here, see, he demoted Alroy Walsh for even suggesting it.”

“They overestimated the CIA’s willingness to choose an asset’s life over his cover.” Jon’s voice twists in bitterness. “Wait- Alroy, I know that name.”

Dan nods. “He’s O’Malley’s second. We kinda liked him, actually, until he set us up. He would have blown us both up if Vietor hadn’t saved our asses.”

Jon swallows. “Fuck. This goes deep into the organization.”

“Yeah.” Dan nods. “And now the Blacks have taken the Vietor issue into their own hands. Four nights ago, Vietor was shot in a firefight. It wasn’t a miss. It wasn’t a mole. Vietor was the target.”

Jon’s breath comes in labored, ragged edges. “He went back in.”

Dan nods.

“We have to get him out.”

Dan nods again. “That’s why we’re here.” He looks back at the room. “This is going to be a dangerous mission. Neither the FBI nor the CIA will be providing backup. Anyone who doesn’t want to be involved can leave now.”

Tanya twists her undershirt so it’s straight and starts doing up the buttons, catching Emily’s eyes and nodding up at Jon. “We’re in.”

Alyssa starts gathering her medical tools. “Hopefully you won’t need my skills, but I’ll be standing by.”

Elijah squeezes Pri’s shoulder. “Never leave one of our own behind, yeah?”

Pri slides her foot under her and nods. “I’m a bit sick of DC, anyway.”

“If the FBI throws you out,” Dan tells her, “Jon and I have some ideas about a winery.”

Pri grins. “Really?”

“Not without your help,” Dan promises. His eyes sweep past Jon and settle on Lovett, who’s staring down at his sandwich. Dan swallows, and when he asks, “Lovett?,” it’s only half about the rescue plan and half about the winery.

Lovett looks up slowly. His hand clenches around the scar of his soul line. “What do I have to lose?”

Dan smiles sadly and Lovett matches it.

“So,” Emily leans forward, “what’s the plan?”

***

Dan realizes his miscalculation about five seconds after the plan goes sideways.

He's been in dangerous situations before. He's lost men in the field and he's attended more state funerals than he can reliably count. He's kissed their widows on their cheeks and he's shook hands with their children, even taken a few to Nats games in an attempt to fill a hole too wide and too deep for any one friend-of-their-father to fill.

As he wraps his hands tighter around Emily's ankles, grunting as she struggles to peer inside the back window high on the wall of the Cyprus, those funerals feel like a lifetime and an ocean away from the pain he’d feel if he has to attend one, this time.

"They've got someone tied up," Emily continues. Her big toe digs into the side of his neck. "I think they’re using square knots."

"I don't really care about the knots," Jon growls, rocking back on the balls of his feet. "Who's _in_ the square knots?"

"How the fuck am I supposed to know?" Emily rises onto her toes and Dan sways with her to keep her balanced.

If she falls, it'll be Tanya's cheek he has to kiss. If they could even get a church to hold her funeral, it'd be Tanya's hair he has to brush back from her neck, Tanya's tears he'll have to wipe away. If this plan ends as violently as it probably will, it might be Jon who's pale and shaky next to him, three pews back, unable to pay the proper respects a spouse should be granted. If Dan makes one mistake, if he puts one foot too far to the left or he presses the trigger a millisecond too late, it might be Dan who's sitting there, it might be Dan's tears, it might be-

Dan turns his head, desperately seeking out Lovett's profile, just to remind himself that he isn't already spread out, pale and lifeless, on a casket pillow.

Emily taps his ear with her toe. "Your other left."

"Sorry." Dan tightens his fingers and takes a step to the left. "That good?"

"Yeah." She rises onto her tiptoes again and Dan can feel Tanya's eyes on them, watching, worrying. "I can see him from here. Sandy hair, pretty terrible smirk - you said this guy's been undercover for five years now?"

Jon makes a noise and Dan nods frantically at Alyssa. She wraps her fingers around Jon's wrist, murmuring, "he has a better chance if we go in together."

Jon nods jerkily.

"He's hanging in there," Emily continues. "Got a pretty nasty thigh wound though. It's bleeding everywhere."

Dan flinches. "That's the bullet wound Jon and I patched up."

"You didn't do a very good job of it." Emily taps Dan's head, squatting and using his wrists to hop off his shoulders. "There's a guard at the door and another on the southeast corner. Besides the interrogator, there’s only one other guy. He looks a little like Lex Luther got a face lift and walked right off the page."

Lovett snorts. "Comic book or the ABC version?"

"Does it matter?" Tanya sighs, exasperated. "If they already have him, his cover is blown. We need a new plan."

Emily smoothes down the front of her canary yellow cocktail dress. It's beaded around the halter that ties behind her neck and pushes her breasts up. There's one pearl, cradled in her collarbone and meant to draw every eye in the room. It was perfect, when the plan was to find and seduce the leader of the Blacks. It's less practical, now that they're staring down a firefight. Emily sighs wistfully. "What a waste of this dress."

Priyanka smiles shyly at her. "If we live through this, I'll make you another one. We can take it dancing.”

Emily grins. "I'd like that."

"Still not the time," Jon grits out, his arms pulling against Alyssa's grip. "New plan?"

Elijah pulls out his gun. "There's eight of us and four of them. I like our odds."

Jon's face splits into an ugly, dangerous grin. "I like your style."

"There's four of us," Dan corrects, "and Alyssa."

Emily frowns at him, her hands on her hips. Her nails are painted bright pink to contrast her dress. "Oh, so I was only useful when you wanted a seduction."

Dan raises an eyebrow. "Have you ever shot a gun?"

Emily raises an eyebrow and pulls a handgun out of the back of her dress. She spins it expertly in her hand. "Wouldn't you like to know."

Pri laughs into her wrist and Alyssa squeezes Dan's shoulder. "Less arguing, more action, Pfeiffer. You've got the rear?"

She doesn't wait for an answer as she falls into step behind Jon. The street lamps cast their bodies in shadow, and Dan has to blink away images of everyone he cares about floating away like so many piles of ash. 

Dan's lost so much already, he can't lose anymore. 

He reaches out, his fingers circling around Lovett's wrist. His skin sings with the contact, his soul line bursting to life in his palm

Lovett's entire body flinches, but he doesn't pull away as he answers Dan’s unspoken question. "No, I haven't ever wielded a gun, but I'm good with my fists. Got quite a bit of experience with them in high school."

Dan bites his lip. "If I asked you to stay behind-?"

"You'd get a taste of exactly how good my upper cut is."

"I figured." Dan chuckles. "This isn't the time or the place, but, I can't die without you knowing how sorry and how in love with you I am."

Lovett's eyes flare and he twists his hand, pressing his scar to the length of Dan's soul line. "Then you better not fucking die."

And then he's gone, following Tanya into the dark headquarters of DC's most dangerous crime organization. There's no back up coming. There's no one on their way to save them. It's just Dan, and everyone who means anything to him.

Dan takes a deep breath and follows them.

***

Dan gets two shots in amidst the commotion and the gun smoke before he’s afraid to shoot anymore. He narrows his eyes, almost certain that the shape in the far corner is a Blacks goon. He recognizes the leather coat, the broad shoulders, except, as the smoke swirls, it looks more like a black blouse, maybe a thick sweep of hair broadening and widening the shoulders. “Fuck,” Dan murmurs, sliding onto his knees to peer under the smoke.

He holds his gun steady and hesitates over the trigger, the figure looking more and more like Tanya and less and less like the last Blacks goon, when a thundering voice cuts through the smoke and his deliberations.

“You needed proof, sir?” Alroy Walsh growls. “An FBI rescue is pretty damn good proof.”

The patriarch of the Blacks, Cian Black, sniffs and waves his gun. He’s five feet and an easy shot from Tommy’s chest. “I appreciate your skills, Vietor. I never suspected. When did you decide to betray me?”

Cian’s words twist, a hint of real regret and betrayal underlying the authority in every inch of him. 

Dan takes a quick survey of the room. Emily and Tanya are ensconced in one corner, the goon guarding the door tied up at their feet, a bruise already forming across his temple in the same shape as the broken chair leg in Emily’s hands. Lovett’s tying the other guard’s hands as Alyssa watches over them with her gun raised, and Elijah has his gun trained on Alroy, who’s still growling at Cian.

“I tried to warn you, sir.”

“If we get out of here, I’ll give you a medal,” Cian growls back, without looking at him.

Alroy smirks, wide and obvious. “I deserve it, sir.”

Pri rolls her eyes, pressing her knee tighter into his ribs and turning her gun, brandishing the butt towards his temple. “If you don’t shut it, I know how to use this.”

Alroy’s mouth twists into a smirk as he opens it.

“Thank you, Agent, I was getting sick of his drivel.” Cian nods. “It’s just you and me, Vietor.”

And closes it again under widening eyes, looking up at Pri with more respect.

Dan motions for Tommy to keep him talking as he takes a step, carefully and quietly, behind Cian. He can feel Lovett’s eyes on him, dark and intense, but he doesn’t look away from his target.

Tommy shrugs. “When do you think, Cian?” He stares down the barrel of the gun, like he’d always assumed his cover was heading in this direction, eventually.

“I let you into my inner circle,” Cian frowns. “I treated you like family.”

“I know.”

Dan takes another step forward, until he’s a hair’s breadth from Cian’s neck. He does dare a glance at Lovett, then, his curls sweaty and his cheeks a healthy shade of pink under a thick, growing bruise. He’s pleading with Dan, but Dan has to look away. His hands tighten on his own gun.

“I gave you everything you asked for,” Cian continues. “More money and power than you could have ever wanted.”

Tommy’s eyes flick towards Jon, who’s standing just to his right, frozen, mid-motion, his body angled towards Tommy’s. “Not everything, Cian.”

Cian’s eyes flash. “If that’s what you wanted, I could have had it arranged.”

Tommy takes a step forward, “like how you arranged a soul match with Katie?” Tommy shakes his head. “You really want to know when I betrayed you, Cian?”

Cian sneers.

Dan nods, from behind his head.

Tommy smiles, a real, dangerous smile. “From the very beginning.”

The rest happens in an instant. Cian’s arm shakes with fury as he pulls the trigger. Dan pushes forward, knocking Cian’s hand down and to the right. Jon leaps forward, pushing himself in front of Tommy.

“_Jon_.” Tommy slides to the ground, Jon’s body weighing him down.

Dan gets Cian’s hands behind him, locking them together with a thick set of handcuffs before he allows himself to look up.

“Stay with me, Jon,” Tommy’s saying, his voice low and desperate. He’s on his knees, Jon spread across them, the blood from his thigh wound mixing with Jon’s. “You stubborn bastard, you’re not going to fucking leave me now. Hang _on_.”

In the distance, Dan can hear sirens. _Fuck_.

“Go,” Alyssa hisses stepping next to him and pushing his hands off Cian’s cuffs. “You can’t be here. They can’t know you were any part of this.”

Dan hesitates. Jon’s breathing is shallow and labored. Tommy’s thigh is bleeding.

“_Go_.” Alyssa repeats, catching Lovett’s gaze across the room. “Both of you. No one’s going to get arrested tonight. Get the fuck out of here.”

***

Dan doesn’t let himself breathe as he leads the way out, past the police cars and the ambulances, past the men dressed in FBI and CIA windbreakers three hours and a lifetime too late to the scene, past the remnant of the Blacks dressed in furs and gold chains as they stand back and watch their empire burn. Dan knows that one of them - maybe the elder gentleman, with Cian’s bone structure and a limp to his step; maybe the young kid, with Cian’s eyes and a much more wicked smile - will build it again, take the ashes of what is left and build something taller and meaner and more terrifyingly beautiful. Dan knows a new generation of FBI agents will struggle to keep up with them, will decipher their codes and infiltrate their ranks, just like he did.

Dan’s glad he won’t be around to see it.

He doesn’t need to turn around to know that Lovett’s right behind him. He can feel Lovett’s ragged breath on the back of his neck and the anxious warmth radiating off his skin. As he slows his pace, though, he does look sideways, suddenly shy even after all they’ve been through over the last few hours. Lovett’s curls are matted on his forehead, his eyes as black as the depths of the ocean, the bruise on his temple spreading in yellows and purples and swollen skin across his cheekbone and under his eye.

This Lovett is so far removed from the bright-eyed, smooth skinned, sarcastic matchmaker he first met. Dan swallows. He’s to blame for that.

Dan turns, stepping in front of Lovett and forcing him to stop, too. Dan reaches up, sliding a curl behind Lovett’s ear so that he can trace the full length of the bruise, from temple to nose.

Lovett shies back, his shoulders tightening as his eyes flick around them, searching for agents and raiders in the shadows between buildings. Dan’s to blame for that, too.

“You have a fucking death wish,” Lovett mutters, stepping back and around him. “Your apartment’s five blocks that way, right?”

Dan swallows around the implications, “yeah,” and leads the way. He wants to reach out, wants to feel the shape of Lovett’s scar against his palm. He wants the reminder that this was worth it, all of it, the raid and Tommy’s cover and Jon, bleeding out on the stone floor of the Cyprus while Dan’s too busy sneaking into the night to be there for him.

Dan shoves his hands into his pockets and doesn’t pull them out again until they climb the steps to his building and he fishes for his keys in his pocket. They jingle, loud in the silence growing wider between them, and it takes Dan a couple of tries to get the door open.

They’re even louder when they clang to the floor, sliding out of his hands as Lovett pushes him up against the closed door. “Are you _trying_ to get us both killed?”

Dan swallows around the physical weight of Lovett’s arm on his chest and the mental weight of having Lovett so close. “I knew where you were every moment in there. I wasn’t going to allow anything to happen to you.”

“Not in the damn bar,” Lovett huffs out a breath. It’s warm in the open vee of Dan’s button-up. “Although, now that you bring it up, I’d gladly talk about this martyr streak you have going. You have no idea how unattractive it is.”

Dan blinks, trying to find a focal point in the depth of Lovett’s eyes, darting back and forth and up and down, like he doesn’t know where to focus or what emotion to focus with. “Lovett-”

“You promised.” Lovett steps back, his arm dropping to cradle his stomach. He looks small and tired, suddenly, as his voice lowers, almost too low for Dan to hear. “You couldn’t even keep your last fucking promise.”

Dan scrambles to catch himself with his palms spread flat against the door. His knees feel too weak to hold him without the strength of Lovett’s body and the force of Lovett’s anger. “Lovett-”

“You promised,” Lovett repeats. “If you died, where the hell would I focus all this anger?”

Dan ducks his head to match Lovett’s lowered chin. “I didn’t die.”

“Not any thanks to you.”

Dan takes a deep breath. “I kept my promise.”

Lovett shakes his head.

“The world isn’t worth living in without you in it,” Dan pushes, allowing an edge of his hard-fought authority into his voice. “I focused on you in there because the only way to ensure my life was to make sure that you survived. I kept my promise, Jon.”

“That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.” Lovett’s eyes are wet. “And what was I supposed to do, huh? What was I supposed to do if Cian Black had turned a moment sooner and put a bullet through your damn thick skull?”

Dan steps forward, away from the door, towards Lovett. He wants to close the space between them. He wants Lovett to understand. He doesn’t ever want Lovett to have to wonder about him again. “You were supposed to survive. You were supposed to rebuild, for my memory and for so many others. You might be the foundation of my world, but you’re the same for so many other people.”

Lovett shakes his head, dropping his eyes. “I can’t provide a home for anyone if my own foundations are crumbling.”

“You did it before me, and you could have after me.”

Lovett’s chin snaps up, his eyes bright as he settles on an emotion and a place to focus it. “You’re infuriating, you know that? Take some responsibility for your own damn actions.”

Dan opens his mouth, but Lovett blows past him.

“You’re the one who walked into _my_ soul agency.” Lovett shakes his head. “You say I’m the center of your world, like I’m, what? The fucking sun your little ball of cold, dead rock can orbit around?”

Dan nods. “The star at the center of my universe.”

“Stop putting me on such a pedestal,” Lovett spits. He steps forward, rising onto his toes so that Dan can’t look away. “You’ve _destroyed_ me, Dan. I used to think I was so damn smart. Before I met you, I thought I had it all figured out. I thought I knew who I was and what my place was in this short, dark life, and I thought I was happy to bring happiness to so many other people. It was _enough_.”

Lovett flattens his palm against Dan’s chest, his scar scratching against the white cotton. Dan’s heart is beating so hard that Lovett has to be able to feel it.

“But then you walked into my office and- I didn’t know a single fucking thing. You turned the earth to quicksand with a single smile and I’ve been trying to catch my footing ever since. And you’ve got to take some fucking responsiblity for that.”

Lovett takes a deep breath and Dan can feel it shaking through Lovett’s fingers.

“I’m so fucking mad at you. I was _happy_. I was doing something _good_.”

Dan reaches up, carefully spreading his hand along Lovett’s, his soul line warm and pulsing against the back of Lovett’s hand. “You can have that again.”

“Not without you.” Lovett’s eyes flash, but he doesn’t pull away. “Don’t you see? You’re my entire fucking world too, Dan. You’re it. You’re everything. I don’t know how to so much as breathe without you anymore.”

Dan swallows.

“So don’t fucking tell me that I could move on without you.” Lovett curls his fingers, his nails digging into Dan’s chest and his hand pressing into Dan’s palm. “And stop underestimating the power you have. It’s not fair.”

Lovett’s breathing hard enough to fill the room with short, haggard breaths. Dan waits a beat, then he rubs his thumb over the back of Lovett’s hand. “I’m sorry, Jon.”

Lovett laughs, a small, curled thing that catches in his throat. “You better fucking be.” He tips forward and Dan catches him, his hand broad and warm on Lovett’s back so that he can feel the proof of his life breathing through both of them.

“I’m sorry about so many things,” Dan breathes into Lovett’s curls. “The raid-”

“I know.” Lovett’s back catches. “I always knew.”

“I’m so sorry,” Dan says, anyway. “I’ve never felt at home anywhere, and I destroyed the one place I had the moment I found it.”

Lovett pulls back, just far enough to look at Dan. His eyes are still deep, but they’re warm now, too. “Our people always have to make sacrifices. Don’t let it eat you alive, that’s what they want.”

Dan bites his lip.

“Besides,” Lovett shrugs. “We can rebuild. If you’re up for it?”

Dan nods. “It’ll take some time before we get the deed for the Swamp Club building back from the FBI-” Lovett shifts away and Dan reaches for him, frowning. “Lovett?”

“We can’t rebuild here.” Lovett’s eyes flick away again. “I thought you understood- We both have lavender marks on our records. If we get caught again-” He shivers. “They know who we are, now.”

Dan shudders as the true meaning of Lovett’s flinch on the street falls around his ears. Fuck, Dan’s an asshole. He didn’t teach Lovett anything. Lovett knew what he was getting into, Lovett knew the costs from the very beginning. It’s Dan who’s been fumbling around in the dark, testing the boundaries with all the precision of an elephant and about as much naiveté.

Dan reaches for Lovett again. “Where, then?”

Lovett looks up at him and bites his lip.

Dan breathes out, “California,” and spreads his hand wide on Lovett’s back. “That was never just talk for you.”

Lovett shakes his head. “An escape plan.”

Dan gives himself only a moment to wonder how long Lovett’s been planning for their downfall before he realizes that the answer is _always_. He takes a deep breath. “I like California. Well, I’ve never been there, but, I like the sound of it.”

Lovett nods, “me too.”

“I like the sound of loving you in the daylight even better,” Dan continues. “I hear we can do that, there.”

Lovett grins, the same wide cheeks and dimples that drew Dan in so many months ago. “I really like the sound of that.”

Dan ducks his head. “I love you so much, Jon.”

Lovett grins and tips onto his toes, “would you kiss me already?”

***

“Favreau?” Dan stops by the nurses’ station. “He was brought in a few nights ago.”

The nurse hums, trailing her finger down her patient index. “It says here that his visitations are restricted.”

Dan smiles his best smile and pulls out his badge. This is the sixth time in the last six days that Dan’s tried to visit Jon’s hospital bed and, as much as he doesn’t like the lie, it’s his last chance. Dan looks down at the badge, knowing that it’ll be the last time he ever flashes it. Good riddance. That badge has more weight on its shoulders than Dan was ever willing to bear. “FBI.”

The nurse nods, slipping immediately into her own winning smile, and motions him after her. “He’s down here.”

Dan’s footsteps feel loud in the early morning quiet. Nurses are gathering pills and patients are just starting to wake with the sunrise, voices hushed and low.

“Room 2A.” The nurse points. “The doctor will be by to check on him in a few, so, don’t keep him too long.”

“I won’t,” Dan promises, taking the last few steps alone and already saying, “you’ve really gotta stop getting yourself shot,” before he sticks his head around the corner.

Tommy’s hand flinches back from Jon’s before he turns and catches sight of Dan. “Pfeiffer,” he says, rushed with relief, as he reaches for Jon’s hand again. Dan can see the flash of Tommy’s soul line, bright with heat, before he presses it to Jon’s, palm to palm, soul line to soul line.

Dan laughs, stepping forward and holding out his opposite hand. “Vietor. I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

“A couple wrong feet,” Tommy agrees, reaching for Dan’s with his free hand. “Start again?”

Dan nods at Jon’s sleeping figure. “I think we better.”

Tommy’s face softens. “Yeah, we better.” 

“I don’t generally let people make second impressions,” Dan shrugs, “but I can make an exception. I figure I owe you for that terrible patch job.”

Tommy looks down at his thigh, wrapped in three layers of thick, white bandages and raised on a footstool. He chuckles. “Doctors say it’s going to scar now.”

“Scars are ruggedly handsome,” Jon rasps, his eyes blinking open slowly. His fingers tighten around Tommy’s as he smiles up at Dan, his eyes glassy with morphine and antibiotics. “What are you doing here? You should be halfway to California by now.”

Dan squeezes Jon’s ankle through his blankets. “Lovett’s circling the block. I don’t have long.”

Jon nods. “Good.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to survive without me though,” Dan says, keeping his voice light, but shivering against the thought of all the trouble Jon would get himself in if he were staying here, alone. “You’ve been shot twice on Vietor’s watch.”

Tommy’s back tightens in a long line. “Never again,” he promises. “I’m resigning from the CIA.”

Jon tugs at his hand, his smile sliding up at the corner, easy and loose. “They gave Tommy a medal of valor for taking down Cian Black.”

The back of Tommy’s neck pinks and he turns, slowly, to look at Dan. “It should have been yours.”

“Well, yeah, the CIA was ready to let you rot in a Blacks’ jail cell forever. We never would have gotten you out if Dan hadn’t figured it out.” Jon chuckles, resting his head back against the pillows. His eyes are already sliding shut again. “But just imagine the looks on their faces when you accept their medal and quit the next day.”

Tommy shakes his head. “Assholes.” His eyebrows soften into his forehead. “Thank you, Pfeiffer. Seriously. I was so lost in there, I’d forgotten that some things are worth living for.”

Dan nods. “I know what that’s like.”

“You should go.” Jon’s chest rises and falls with heavy breaths. “The doctors say I need a few months, but-”

Dan nods, tightening his fingers on Jon’s ankle. “Take your time. We’ll be waiting for you.” He glances at Tommy. “Both of you.”

***

Lovett’s idling around the corner from the hospital.

“Conspicuous,” Dan sighs as he opens the door of the canary yellow Chevy convertible Lovett had bought with the proceeds from selling Swamp Souls and its building. Pundit wags her tail, tripping over the gear stick so she can settle on Dan’s thighs, her head hanging out the window.

“In DC, maybe,” Lovett shrugs. “But not where we’re going.”

“Yeah.” Dan smiles. “It’ll fit right in in California.”

Lovett grins, hitting the gas as they make the outskirts of DC and shoot towards freedom. He holds his hand out, palm up, on the console between them.

The sun is high in the sky, but Dan twists their fingers together anyway, his entire body warming as his soul line bursts to life. “We all will.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please go watch the [wonderful trailer](https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/threeblondeswithanxiety/186702059868) Mags made for this fic!
> 
> Comments and kudos, as always, appreciated! And come find me on [Tumblr](https://stainyourhands.tumblr.com/)!


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